Big Uncle Cemetery
Richland Springs, San Saba County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Big Uncle Cemetery Established 1859 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2000
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Established in 1859, Big Uncle Cemetery lies in the rolling San Saba County country of central Texas, settled in the years just before the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000, it marks one of the earliest burial grounds of a frontier farming and ranching district. Its graves record the pioneers who ventured into a still-remote corner of the young state.
Why it matters
Antebellum frontier cemeteries preserve the earliest chapters of Texas settlement, mapping where families risked the edge of the American frontier.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Shiloh Cemetery
Richland Spring, TX
Shiloh Cemetery was established in 1892, serving the rural community around Richland Springs in San Saba County. Burial grounds like this one were often the first permanent institutions in late-19th-century Texas settlements, tying scattered farming families to a shared place. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 1998 in recognition of that heritage.
San Saba Cemetery
San Saba, TX
Originally the Odd Fellows Cemetery, this burial ground began in 1883 when the local IOOF lodge bought ten acres north of old San Saba and maintained it for forty-five years. In 1929 the newly incorporated San Saba Cemetery Association purchased the grounds and additional acreage for token sums, and in 1935 burials from the town's earliest city cemetery were reinterred here. The cemetery stands as a continuing record of San Saba's earliest citizens and its changing community.
San Saba Church of Christ
San Saba, TX
When San Saba County was organized in 1856, the commissioners granted a block of land to each religious body, and the local Christian church traded for a site and raised a small frame building. Early worship depended on lay elders and traveling ministers, punctuated by the lively public religious debates popular in frontier San Saba. The national 1904 division within the Christian church led this congregation to become a Church of Christ, and it weathered the Depression, a 1957 split, and lean years to flourish again in the 1970s.
Estep-Burleson Building
San Saba, TX
Elijah Estep, San Saba County's second tax assessor-collector, built this two-story building of locally quarried limestone facing the courthouse in the early 1870s, running a mercantile store nearby. Long mislabeled the "Burden Hotel," records show it was Estep's own construction on a lot he bought in 1871. It later served as attorney Leigh Burleson's law office and passed through other hands, narrowly escaping demolition in the 1990s before being donated and restored to its 1911 appearance.