Dikes Family Cemetery

🏛️The era

When Miles G. Dikes left Georgia for Texas in 1829, Texas was part of Mexico. To draw settlers into its sparsely populated northern frontier, the Mexican government allowed empresarios, or land agents, to bring in colonists. Green DeWitt's colony, centered on the town of Gonzales, was one of the earliest of these grants.

The DeWitt colonists lived on a dangerous edge. Raids, hardship and isolation were part of daily life. Within a few years, tensions between the Anglo settlers and the Mexican government began to rise, and Gonzales found itself at the heart of the conflict. In 1835, its settlers refused to give up a small cannon, and the skirmish that followed is remembered as the first fight of the Texas Revolution.

By the time Dikes set aside this family burial ground around 1850, Texas had gone from Mexican province to independent republic to American state. A man who arrived as a Mexican colonist was by then a citizen of the United States, all without ever moving his home.

👥People & events

Miles G. Dikes was born in 1804 and was an original member of the DeWitt Colony, arriving from Georgia in 1829. Like many of the colony's early settlers, he came to build a farm and a family in the new land.

In 1839 he married Eady Hodges, who was born in 1810. Together they made a life in Gonzales County through the years of the Republic of Texas and into statehood. Around 1850, Dikes set aside this land as a family cemetery, a common practice for rural families who lived far from town churchyards.

The first known burial here came in 1859, when the Dikes' son Lovic was laid to rest. That first grave turned this patch of family land into a place of memory. Eady Dikes died in 1868 and Miles in 1872.

Today the cemetery holds twenty marked graves, along with others that are unmarked. Those unmarked graves are a reminder of how much of frontier family history has gone unrecorded. Remarkably, the cemetery is still used by the family's descendants, so the story Miles Dikes started here is still being written.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The DeWitt Colony was part of one of the most consequential migrations in American history: the movement of settlers from the United States into Mexican Texas. Those settlers, and the tensions their arrival created, led to the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas, and eventually Texas's annexation to the United States, which helped set off the Mexican-American War.

The Dikes family's journey mirrors that larger arc. They arrived as colonists under a foreign flag and became citizens of a republic and then a state, a reminder of just how quickly borders and loyalties shifted on the American frontier.

Family cemeteries like this one are also part of the national story. Across rural America, families buried their own on their own land, and many of those graveyards have since been lost. One that is still cared for and still used by descendants is a rare, living link between today and the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Texas.

🧭If you visit

Family cemeteries are quiet, personal places, and this one is still in use by the Dikes descendants. Visit with respect: stay on any paths, leave stones and plantings as you find them, and be mindful that this is someone's family plot. If the cemetery sits on private land, ask permission before entering.

If you can visit, take time to read the stones. The dates on them span from the colonial era into modern times, and the gap between the marked graves and the stated number of burials will remind you of the many people who left no inscription behind.

Gonzales is one of Texas's most storied historic towns, often called the birthplace of the Texas Revolution. Make this cemetery part of a wider day in the area, exploring the town's revolutionary history and the countryside the DeWitt colonists first settled.