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Haynie Flat Cemetery

Spicewood, Burnet County, Texas

Marker Inscription

The Haynie Flat community was a sparsely populated settlement established in the 1800s near Red Bluff Creek and the Colorado River along the Burnet-Travis county line. The earliest graves in Haynie Flat Cemetery are for siblings, Sallie A. Cox (age 18) and Dennis Cox (age 7), who died four months apart in 1864. Although these burials indicate some degree of occupation in the 1860s, the land is considered to have been settled in 1879, the same year Haynie Flat School opened. The schoolhouse was adjacent to the cemetery, and the attendance area covered parts of Burnet and Travis counties. Maps and land records document no formal claim on the Haynie Flat community from Burnet County's creation in the 1850s until W.W. Burton patented a 160-acre survey with the General Land Office in 1897. An affidavit described Haynie Flat as beginning "at Turner Crossing on the Pedernales River and running northwest along the road." An April 1939 deed from the heirs of William ("Willie") Naumann to B.R. Carpenter is the first to explicitly mention the cemetery, with a conveyance "save and except two acres heretofore deeded to trustees of Haynie Flat School and three acres hereby reserved for a cemetery known as the Haynie Flat Cemetery." Landscape features include native cedar and live oak trees and primarily granite and marble grave markers. Haynie Flat School consolidated with Spicewood in 1950, and the school building continued to be used as a community gathering place and as an election polling place into the 1970s. Residential development of the area in the 1980s left the cemetery as one of the few reminders of the Haynie Flat community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2018. Haynie Flat Cemetery Established 1864 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2018

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

The sparsely settled Haynie Flat community grew up near Red Bluff Creek and the Colorado River along the Burnet-Travis county line. Its cemetery's earliest graves belong to siblings Sallie and Dennis Cox, who died months apart in 1864, though the area is generally reckoned as settled in 1879 when the adjacent Haynie Flat School opened. Land records trace the community's slow formalization over decades, and after the school consolidated with Spicewood in 1950 and residential development arrived in the 1980s, the cemetery remained one of the few reminders that a community had ever stood here.

Why it matters

Haynie Flat Cemetery is the last trace of a vanished rural community, preserving the memory of the farm families who settled the Texas Hill Country before suburban growth erased their world.

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Related people

  • · Sallie A. Cox
  • · Dennis Cox
  • · W. W. Burton

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionFrontier HistoryLandmark

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