Collins Cemetery
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established by Newton Isaac Collins, Sr. (1826-1903), an emancipated slave from Alabama, the Collins Cemetery is the final resting place for his family. After the Civil War, Collins acquired land throughout eastern Travis County, establishing the thriving community of Pilot Knob. The first known burial was Collins' son-in-law, Ben Bremond, in 1894. Dee Gabriel Collins (1863-1926), Collins' son, is buried here with his wife, Donnie Louise (Sauls) Collins (1869-1933), along with Collins' daughter Vinie (Collins) Bremond (1856-1912) and other members of the Collins and Bremond families. A small iron fence encloses a monument for Newton I. Collins, Sr., an integral member of the Pilot Knob community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This family burial ground was established by Newton Isaac Collins, Sr., who came out of slavery in Alabama and, after the Civil War, acquired land across eastern Travis County and founded the thriving community of Pilot Knob. The first known burial here was his son-in-law in 1894, and generations of the Collins and Bremond families followed, gathered around a monument to the community's founder. A small iron fence still encloses his memorial.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a tangible record of Black landownership and community-building in Texas during Reconstruction, when emancipated people turned freedom into land, family, and lasting institutions.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand in eastern Travis County in the years after the Civil War was to stand in a landscape being remade. Slavery had ended, and hundreds of thousands of newly free people across Texas faced the enormous question of what freedom would actually mean when the fields, the tools, and the land itself still belonged to others.
Reconstruction promised much and delivered unevenly. For a brief window, federal authority and Black political participation opened real doors, but those doors narrowed as the decades wore on and the Gilded Age settled into place. In that shifting climate, the surest form of freedom was the one you could hold a deed to.
This rolling country south and east of Austin was farmland then, dotted with small settlements where families put down roots one acre at a time. It is against that backdrop that a burial ground here becomes something larger than a family plot: it is the record of people who turned emancipation into ownership.
People & events
The story here begins with Newton Isaac Collins, Sr., born in 1826 and freed from slavery in Alabama. After the war he came to Texas and did the thing that was hardest for a formerly enslaved man to do: he acquired land, and then more of it, across eastern Travis County.
Out of that land he built a community, Pilot Knob, and it thrived. Around him gathered a family whose names are now gathered again in this cemetery. The first known burial, in 1894, was his son-in-law, Ben Bremond. His daughter Vinie Collins Bremond, who had married into that name, was laid here in 1912.
His son Dee Gabriel Collins, born in 1863, rests here too, alongside his wife, Donnie Louise Collins. Newton Collins himself lived to 1903, a long life that spanned bondage, war, emancipation, and the making of a whole community. A small iron fence still encloses the monument raised to him, a quiet marker of a man his neighbors clearly counted as essential.
Its place in the American story
What happened at Pilot Knob happened, in different forms, all across the post-emancipation South. Freed people founded what historians often call freedom colonies or freedmen's settlements, pooling labor and savings to buy land, build churches and schools, and bury their dead on ground they owned outright.
That ownership mattered far beyond sentiment. In an era when Black political and economic rights were being steadily rolled back, a deed was a kind of armor. Land meant a family could farm for itself, pass something down, and anchor an institution that outlasted any one generation.
A family cemetery, then, is a national document in miniature. It testifies that freedom, for the people who won it, was not an abstraction but a practical project of land, kinship, and community built to endure.
If you visit
Come to a place like this expecting quiet. This is a family resting place, not a museum, and the right posture is respect. If you are unsure whether it is open to visitors, ask locally first rather than assuming access.
Look for the small iron fence and the monument it encloses; that is the heart of the site, raised to the man who started it all. Reading the family names together, generation beside generation, is the whole experience, an entire community's arc in a single glance.
If you are threading historic sites into a drive through the country south and east of Austin, this is a stop that rewards slowness. It is easy to speed past the accomplishment recorded here. Standing among these graves, you feel the weight of what it took to gather them.
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
- · Newton Isaac Collins, Sr.
- · Dee Gabriel Collins
- · Vinie Collins Bremond
- · Ben Bremond
Themes & tags
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