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.
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Related people
- · Parker Milton Levy
- · Silas Burks
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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