Dessau Cemetery
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established ca. 1874 Historic texas cemetery – 2009
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Established around 1874 in what is now northeast Austin, Dessau Cemetery served a farming community settled in the years after the Civil War, when German and other families worked the blackland prairie of Travis County. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery preserves it as a record of that early rural settlement.
Why it matters
The burial ground anchors the memory of a nineteenth-century farming community now absorbed into the growing city of Austin.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fortress Home
Austin, TX
Martin Wieland, a settler from Dessau, Germany, built this sturdy home in the early 1850s on the Central Texas frontier, where it doubled as a place of refuge for neighbors in times of danger. Successive enlargements in 1873 and 1912 show how the household and community grew alongside it. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.
The Gault Homestead
Austin, TX
In the decades after Texas won its independence, land granted for service to the young Republic passed through several owners before John Gault built a log cabin here in the 1850s and raised a farming family. The homestead anchored the small rural community of Merrilltown, and its modest cabin grew with later additions as it changed hands across the generations. By the 1980s the surrounding fields had given way to suburban Austin, leaving the old place as a survivor of the county's pioneer countryside.
Merrilltown Cemetery
Austin, TX
Captain Nelson Merrell settled here in 1837, opening a store and post office and giving his name to the Merrilltown community. He deeded land for a church, a school, and this burial ground, served as a Travis County commissioner, helped build Congress Avenue in Austin, and led a company of Rangers guarding the settlement. The cemetery's graves—marked by obelisks, fraternal-order stones, and curbing—hold community leaders and veterans reaching back to the Civil War.
The Old Zimmerman Home
Austin, TX
Edward E. Zimmerman left Germany for Texas in 1844 and settled with his wife Regina near Austin a decade later, part of the German immigration that reshaped the Hill Country. In 1861 he built this sturdy farmhouse of local cream-colored stone and Bull Creek lumber, along the Shawnee Trail that carried traders, immigrants, and great cattle drives of the 1850s and 60s. Family lore even recalls Regina shooting a bear at the back door.