de la Zerda Cemetery
Floresville, Wilson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery, located on the high east bank of the San Antonio River, served residents of the trading community of Lodi, which declined in the 20th century. Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr., born in San Antonio in 1808, was a rancher, businessman and former soldier under Juan Seguin. He purchased this land in 1839. The earliest burial in the cemetery dates to 1877, though it is believed there are earlier unmarked graves. One notable burial is that of Benito Lopez, a prominent Lodi and Floresville business owner. This burial ground features interior fencing and Spanish language grave markers. The cemetery chronicles the lives of early pioneers of the Mexican American community of Lodi. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On a bluff above the San Antonio River, this cemetery served the vanished trading community of Lodi. Its namesake, Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr., born in San Antonio in 1808, was a rancher and former soldier under Tejano leader Juan Seguín who bought the land in 1839. The earliest marked grave dates to 1877, though older unmarked burials are believed to lie here, and Spanish-language headstones and interior fencing reflect its Mexican American heritage.
Why it matters
The burial ground preserves the deep roots of Tejano ranching families whose presence in South Texas predates and outlasted the towns that grew up around them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand on the high east bank of the San Antonio River is to stand where Texas was Tejano long before it was anything else. When Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr. was born in San Antonio in 1808, this land belonged to Spain; by the time he bought his acreage here in 1839, Texas had become an independent republic barely three years old. The people who lived and worked along this stretch of river were Spanish-speaking ranching families whose roots in the region reached back generations.
The trading community of Lodi grew up in a landscape defined by the river. Water meant survival for cattle and crops, and a reliable bank meant a place to gather, trade, and bury the dead. Communities like Lodi were the connective tissue of early South Texas — small, self-reliant, and organized around family, faith, and land.
The periods this ground touches run from the Early Republic through Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age. Over those decades the frontier economy shifted around places like Lodi, and many such trading settlements faded as railroads and larger towns pulled commerce elsewhere. The cemetery outlasted the community it served.
People & events
The cemetery carries the name of Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr., and his life reads like a compressed history of early Texas. A rancher and businessman, he had also served as a soldier under Juan Seguín, one of the most consequential Tejano figures of the era — a man who fought for Texas independence and later led San Antonio as its mayor. That a Lodi rancher rode under Seguín places this quiet riverbank inside the larger drama of the Texas Revolution and its aftermath.
De la Zerda purchased this land in 1839, and it became the resting place for the families of Lodi. The earliest marked burial dates to 1877, though the marker notes the strong likelihood of older, unmarked graves — the unrecorded first generations whose names the stone could not hold.
Among those laid to rest here is Benito Lopez, remembered as a prominent business owner in both Lodi and Floresville. His grave is a reminder that this was not only a pioneer burial ground but a record of a working, striving community — merchants and ranchers who built livelihoods on the frontier and passed their names down through the families that buried them here.
Its place in the American story
American history too often begins its Texas chapter in 1836, as though the land were empty before Anglo settlement. Places like this cemetery correct that story. The Mexican American families of Lodi were here early and stayed late, and their presence is written plainly in the Spanish-language grave markers and the interior fencing that set family plots apart.
This is the deeper American narrative of the borderlands: that the Southwest was already peopled, already ranching, already burying its dead in consecrated ground when the maps changed names above their heads. The de la Zerda family and their neighbors did not arrive in Texas — Texas, in a sense, arrived around them.
That a Tejano rancher who once soldiered under Juan Seguín could purchase land, build a business, and found a burial ground that endures nearly two centuries later is itself a piece of the national story — the persistence of communities whose contributions were long overlooked in the tellings that came after.
If you visit
Come for the setting first. The cemetery sits on a bluff above the San Antonio River, the kind of high, well-drained ground that early families chose deliberately for their dead. Stand at the edge and you can feel why this spot mattered: the river below, the open Wilson County country around, the sense of a place both sheltered and commanding.
Walk slowly among the stones and read them as a record. The Spanish-language inscriptions and the interior fencing around family plots tell you this was a Mexican American community that kept its own customs and honored its own. Look for the older markers clustered near what may be the unmarked early graves the historical record only suspects are there.
If you are building a road trip through South Texas, let this be the quiet counterweight to the missions and battlefields — a small, human place where the frontier's ranching families rest. It pairs naturally with a drive along the river country around Floresville, where the land still carries the shape of the world Lodi knew.
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
- · Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr.
- · Juan Seguín
- · Benito Lopez
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Old Town: Lodi
Floresville, TX
By 1720 this land along the river was known as the country of the Cayopines, a Coahuiltecan people, and it became vital to the San Antonio missions, whose herds grazed here tended by herdsmen in adobe huts. Apache raids after 1731 drove those herdsmen to shelter at Mission Cabras, and the ground passed through Spanish ranchos and Canary Islander families before Anglo settler Stephen T. Cook opened a store in 1858 and named the place Lodi. Chosen county seat in 1867, Lodi lost that honor to Floresville in 1872 and reverted to ranching.
First Baptist Church of Floresville
Floresville, TX
The Rev. John Washburn came from Illinois to Texas in 1877 and soon settled in Floresville to lead the Floresville Academy, and it was there in August 1878 that some twenty charter members gathered at the Wilson County Courthouse to organize this Baptist fellowship. For its first decade the congregation worshipped in the courthouse before buying land — once part of the vast Arocha league grants — and raising a simple 40-by-60-foot church in 1889. The building was enlarged and rebuilt across the following century as the congregation grew.
Floresville United Methodist Church
Floresville, TX
Methodists in Floresville organized their congregation in October 1875 at the home of the Agee family, with only six charter members and a circuit-riding minister as their first pastor. In the early years they worshiped wherever they could—homes, the county courthouse, a private academy—before completing a sanctuary in 1885 that a storm soon destroyed. Rebuilt and merged over the years with neighboring congregations, the church has served this Wilson County seat for well over a century.
Captain Will Wright
Floresville, TX
Will Wright (1868–1942) was a founding officer of Company D of the Texas Rangers, part of a family threaded through the Rangers and the Border Patrol. Before that he served Wilson County as deputy sheriff and then sheriff from 1902 to 1917, raising his family in the jailer's quarters while in office. Remembered as always armed and a stern but gentlemanly leader, he embodied the lawman of the South Texas borderlands.