Driftwood Cemetery

🏛️The era

After the Civil War, the Texas Hill Country west of Austin drew settlers looking for land, water, and a fresh start. Families built homes along creeks and among the limestone hills, raised livestock, and planted crops in rocky soil. Small communities like Driftwood grew up around churches, schools, and the people who knew one another as neighbors.

Churches were often the center of rural life. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had formed in the 1840s when American Methodism split along regional lines, largely over slavery. In the decades after the war, it remained a strong presence across Texas, served by circuit preachers who rode from congregation to congregation.

Many of the men who settled the Hill Country in these years had lived through the Civil War. Their generation carried the memory of that conflict into the quiet business of building towns, churches, and, eventually, the cemeteries where they would be laid to rest.

👥People & events

The cemetery's story begins in 1884, when the Driftwood Methodist Episcopal Church, South, built a sanctuary here on two acres acquired from David L. and Mattie Elizabeth Dorrah. Later that same year, the congregation set aside a portion of the churchyard just south of the sanctuary as a burial ground.

This was not the community's first cemetery. An older one, established in the 1870s about a mile to the north, was known as the Old Community Cemetery. When the new graveyard opened, several burials were moved from the old site and reinterred here, including many of the area's early settlers. It was an act of care that brought the community's founders together in one place.

Among those buried here are trustees of the church who helped establish the cemetery: James Thomas Eckols, Sr., Thomas Martin, and the Rev. John Alexander Garrison, a prominent Methodist circuit preacher. Garrison's career reflects a vital part of frontier religious life, when ministers traveled long distances to serve scattered congregations.

The cemetery also holds the graves of at least eight Civil War veterans, along with many community and church leaders. Today it remains in use, cared for by the Driftwood Cemetery Association, so the story it tells is still being written.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Small rural cemeteries like this one are among the most direct links to ordinary American life in the nineteenth century. They record the names of the people who settled the land, built churches, and shaped communities that history books rarely mention, but that formed the backbone of the country.

The veterans buried here connect this quiet Hill Country churchyard to the defining conflict of the century. Across the South and the nation, the Civil War generation spent the rest of their lives in places like Driftwood, and their graves are scattered through thousands of small cemeteries just like this one.

The cemetery also reflects the importance of churches, and of traveling preachers, in the spread of American settlement. Congregations such as this one gave frontier communities their center, their institutions, and their sense of continuity, and a churchyard cemetery is where that continuity becomes most visible.

🧭If you visit

Driftwood Cemetery is a peaceful place, set in the rolling Hill Country southwest of Austin. Take your time walking among the stones. Look for the older markers and notice the dates, which trace the community back to its earliest years.

Keep in mind that this is an active cemetery, still in use and cared for by a local association. Visit quietly and respectfully, stay on paths where possible, and do not disturb graves or decorations left by families.

The Driftwood area is a lovely stop on a Hill Country drive, with winding roads, limestone hills, and small communities nearby. Pair a visit here with other historic churches and towns in Hays County for a day that explores how this beautiful corner of Texas was settled.