Cedar Knob Cemetery (HTC)
Salado, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first settlers on the Lampasas River Basin were servicemen who received land grants after gaining Texas’ Independence or men who came in search of grassland for their herds. Located south of Cedar Knob Mountain, this historic cemetery is the final resting place for many of the area’s early pioneers. Parker Milton Levy (1819-1882) came from Tennessee in 1842 in search of grassland. He met and married Mary Elizabeth McNutt (1830-1858) in 1843, daughter of Major Robert McNutt who owned land in the area. When Elizabeth died while giving birth to her fourth child in 1858, she was buried on the homesite, thus creating the Levy Cemetery, later known as Burriss Cemetery, later relocated here. Parker remarried Sarah A. Bruce (1835-1909) and went on to have an additional nine children. In 1876, a 15-wagon caravan traveled from Reynolds County, Missouri, to this area that included John Wiley Allen, Sr. (1835-1880) and wife Julia Thornton Allen (1851-1944). Soon after the caravan’s arrival, a small child died and the owner of land south of the mountain, Silas Burks (1848-1905), donated ten acres for a cemetery, creating Cedar Knob Cemetery. In 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased 282 spaces from the Cedar Knob Cemetery Association for the Relocation of Ten Cemeteries that were to be moved from the lower bottom lands of the Lampasas River for construction of the Stillhouse Dam. The relocated cemeteries were the Burriss, Keys Valley, Wilkinson Valley, Gotcher, Benjamin Ellis, Barker and four unknown cemeteries with burials dating to 1848/1850.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The first settlers along the Lampasas River basin were veterans who took land grants after Texas independence and stockmen seeking grassland for their herds. This cemetery below Cedar Knob Mountain grew from an 1858 homestead burial and a donation of land by Silas Burks in the 1870s, gathering pioneers who arrived by wagon caravan from as far as Missouri. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers relocated it and nine other cemeteries here ahead of the Stillhouse dam, consolidating burials dating to the late 1840s.
Why it matters
It preserves the graves of Texas's earliest frontier settlers, gathered together when mid-century dam building reshaped the river valleys they had claimed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Lampasas River basin was settled by two kinds of restless people: soldiers and stockmen. In the years surrounding the Texas Revolution, men who had served were rewarded with land grants, and that promise of acreage pulled families toward the edge of the frontier. Others came without a grant at all, drawn simply by the sight of open grassland — the raw material of a cattle fortune for anyone willing to risk the distance and the danger.
This was Texas in its Early Republic years and the decades that followed, when the country west of the older settlements was still genuinely a frontier. Below Cedar Knob Mountain, the grass ran long and the water was near, and that combination was enough to make a place worth claiming, defending, and eventually dying on.
The cemetery that grew up here holds the generation that arrived when this was the far edge of things. Their lives were shaped by distance — from markets, from doctors, from the settled world — and by the constant labor of turning wild country into home. To understand these graves is to understand a frontier that has almost entirely vanished from living memory.
People & events
One of the earliest of these pioneers was Parker Milton Levy, born in 1819, who came from Tennessee in 1842 chasing grassland for a herd. Within a year he had married Mary Elizabeth McNutt, daughter of a local landowner, Major Robert McNutt. Their story turned tragic in 1858, when Elizabeth died giving birth to her fourth child. She was buried right on the homesite — and that single grave became the first Levy Cemetery, later known as Burriss Cemetery. Parker went on to remarry Sarah A. Bruce and raise nine more children, the kind of large frontier family that the land and the era demanded.
The wider community's cemetery has a different origin. In 1876, a caravan of fifteen wagons rolled in from Reynolds County, Missouri, carrying families like that of John Wiley Allen, Sr. and his wife, Julia Thornton Allen. Soon after they arrived, a small child died — and a nearby landowner, Silas Burks, donated ten acres for a burying ground. That gift created Cedar Knob Cemetery, born, like so many, out of a family's grief and a neighbor's generosity.
Decades later, the modern world reshaped all of this. In 1965 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased hundreds of grave spaces here to receive the remains of ten cemeteries being moved out of the low bottomlands of the Lampasas River, ahead of construction of the Stillhouse dam. The relocated grounds — Burriss, Keys Valley, Wilkinson Valley, Gotcher, Benjamin Ellis, Barker, and several unknown cemeteries — held burials dating back to 1848 and 1850. What you see today is many small frontier cemeteries gathered into one.
Its place in the American story
Cedar Knob Cemetery tells two chapters of the American story at once. The first is settlement: the land grants for revolutionary service, the stockmen following the grass, the wagon caravans crossing hundreds of miles from places like Missouri to start over. This is westward expansion in its most concrete form — not as policy, but as families packing everything they owned and betting it on a patch of unfamiliar prairie.
The second chapter is one the earliest settlers could never have imagined: the mid-twentieth-century era of great public works. When the federal government built dams to control rivers and store water, whole valleys were deliberately flooded, and the living weren't the only ones who had to move. The relocation of ten cemeteries to this single hillside is a vivid example of how modern infrastructure reached back and rearranged even the resting places of the pioneers.
That makes this ground a rare meeting point of two Americas — the frontier that claimed the river valley and the modern nation that reshaped it. Burials dating to the 1840s now lie on land bought and consolidated by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s, more than a century of history brought together by an act of engineering.
If you visit
Approach Cedar Knob Cemetery knowing you're standing in a gathered place — not one community's burying ground, but many, brought together on higher land when the river valleys below were given over to a reservoir. That knowledge changes how the rows of stones read.
Look for the contrast in the markers. Some carry dates from the 1840s and 1850s, older than nearly anything around them, because they were carried here from cemeteries that no longer exist in their original spots. As you walk, you're essentially touring the frontier of the whole lower Lampasas country, condensed into one hillside below Cedar Knob Mountain.
It's a fitting stop for travelers interested in how Texas was settled and how it was later transformed. Take in the view of the surrounding country and imagine the fifteen-wagon caravan cresting the horizon in 1876, then think of the surveyors and engineers who, ninety years later, drew the lines that moved these graves. Few small cemeteries hold that much of the American timeline in a single quiet acre.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Parker Milton Levy
- · Silas Burks
Themes & tags
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