Gates Cemetery
Gonzales, Gonzales County, Texas
Marker Inscription
GATES CEMETERY THE GATES FAMILY CAME TO TEXAS AS PART OF STEPHEN F. AUSTIN’S ORIGINAL COLONY. THIS CEMETERY, THE FAMILY’S SECOND IN TEXAS, WAS ESTABLISHED ON LAND GIVEN TO SAMUEL H. GATES FOR SERVICE IN TEXAS’ WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE. HE AND HIS WIFE, ELIZA DILLARD, RAISED THEIR FOUR CHILDREN IN THE GATES-WELL COMMUNITY, WHICH WAS SERVED BY THIS CEMETERY AND BY A SCHOOLHOUSE IN USE UNTIL THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY. THE FIRST BURIAL HERE WAS THAT OF THE GATES’ SON SAMUEL A., A CONFEDERATE VETERAN IMPRISONED AT VICKSBURG WHO DIED SHORTLY AFTER HIS RETURN HOME IN 1863. OTHER BURIALS INCLUDE HIS FATHER, SAMUEL H., AND HIS BROTHER, JOSEPH DILLARD GATES, A SECOND SERGEANT IN COMPANY I, FIRST TEXAS REGIMENT, ONE OF TEXAS’ FIRST CONFEDERATE UNITS. JOSEPH LATER SERVED AS INSPECTOR OF CATTLE AND AS GONZALES COUNTY COMMISSIONER. HIS GRANDDAUGHTER JAIME K. FERGUSON, ALSO BURIED HERE, WORKED FOR THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR AS A TEACHER ON INDIAN RESERVATIONS. SHE HELPED FORM A CEMETERY ASSOCIATION TO MAINTAIN THESE GROUNDS, THE RESTING PLACE FOR GENERATIONS OF GATES FAMILY MEMBERS. THE CEMETERY’S FEATURES DEMONSTRATE DECADES OF BURIAL PRACTICES AND REFLECT THE AREA’S EARLY HISTORY. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY - 2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Gates family came to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's original colony, and this cemetery sits on land granted to Samuel H. Gates for service in the Texas War for Independence. The first burial, in 1863, was his son Samuel A., a Confederate soldier who died soon after returning from imprisonment at Vicksburg; another son, Joseph Dillard Gates, served in one of Texas's first Confederate units before a career in county affairs. A later descendant taught on Indian reservations and helped organize the cemetery association.
Why it matters
Spanning Austin's colony, the Texas Revolution, and the Civil War, the Gates graves trace one family's passage through the founding chapters of Anglo-American Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Gates Cemetery sits in country that was among the very first opened to Anglo-American settlement in Texas. The Gates family arrived as part of Stephen F. Austin's original colony, the founding wave of settlers often remembered as the Old Three Hundred. To come to Texas that early was to come before there was much of anything: before towns, before roads, before the revolution that would make Texas independent.
Those first colonists lived through the whole arc of early Texas history in a single lifetime. They cleared land under Mexican rule, took part in the war for independence, built farms and communities in the young republic and then the new state, and finally saw their sons march off to the Civil War. The Gates graves span exactly that arc, from Austin's colony to the war between the states.
This is frontier country layered with the Early Republic and the Civil War eras, a place where the founding generation and the war generation lie in the same ground. The cemetery is the family's second in Texas, a detail that itself speaks to how a household put down roots, moved, and put them down again.
People & events
The land itself is a record of service. This cemetery was established on ground granted to Samuel H. Gates for his part in the Texas War for Independence, the kind of land bounty a young republic used to reward the men who had fought for it. On that land Samuel and his wife, Eliza Dillard, raised four children in the Gates-Well community, a settlement served by this burying ground and by a schoolhouse that stayed in use until around the turn of the twentieth century.
The first grave here carries the mark of the Civil War. It belongs to the couple's son, Samuel A. Gates, a Confederate veteran who had been imprisoned at Vicksburg and who died in 1863 shortly after he made it home. His father, Samuel H., would later join him, as would his brother Joseph Dillard Gates, a second sergeant in Company I of the First Texas Regiment, one of the state's earliest Confederate units.
Joseph's life reached beyond the war. He went on to serve as an inspector of cattle and as a Gonzales County commissioner, trading the soldier's duties for the citizen's. Later still, his granddaughter Jaime K. Ferguson, also buried here, worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior as a teacher on Indian reservations, and it was she who helped form the association that maintains these grounds.
Its place in the American story
One family's graves can sometimes hold the outline of a whole national story, and the Gates plot does exactly that. Follow the generations and you pass through the founding chapters of Anglo-American Texas: the colonial settlement under Austin, the fight for independence rewarded with land, the Civil War that swept up the founders' sons, and the long American century that followed.
There is something quietly telling in the later lives, too. A Confederate veteran's brother becomes a county officer and a cattle inspector, helping to govern and order the very frontier the family had helped settle. A great-granddaughter takes a federal job teaching on reservations far away, then comes home to be buried among her kin. In those turns you can read the way a single Southern frontier family kept moving with the nation as it changed.
That is the larger significance of a place like this. Grand history is made of exactly these threads, ordinary families whose service, losses, and quiet public work accumulate, generation by generation, into the story of a country.
If you visit
Approach Gates Cemetery as a family album written in stone. Because this was one family's second burying ground in Texas, the graves cluster tightly, and part of the reward of a visit is tracing the kinship that ties the stones together across the generations.
Begin with the earliest marker and let the dates carry you forward. You will move from the founding generation of Austin's colony through the Civil War grave that opened the cemetery in 1863 and onward into the twentieth century. Reading those dates in order lets you feel the eras change beneath your feet, from revolution to war to a settled county.
This is a designated Historic Texas Cemetery, and its features quietly reflect decades of changing burial customs, worth slowing down to notice. Set in the rolling countryside of Gonzales County, it makes a fine stop on a day given over to back-road Texas history, a small, well-tended place that rewards a visitor willing to walk the rows and let one family tell the story of a frontier.
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
- · Samuel H. Gates
- · Samuel A. Gates
- · Joseph Dillard Gates
Themes & tags
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