Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery
Yorktown, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1867, Anton (1815-1889) and Lucyia (1830-1912) Koszielsky deeded land to the Roman Catholic Church for a graveyard to serve the parishioners of the growing Catholic community of Yorktown. In 1916, Jesse H. (1866-1943) and Constantine (1866-1941) Kozelski donated additional acreage to enlarge the cemetery. In 1937, an extensive landscaping project was completed and crucifixion monument, donated by Frank and Florentyna Jendrzey, became the focal point of the cemetery. Elizabeth Wollny donated the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1979. The cemetery chronicles the diverse heritage of the Yorktown area. Historic Texas Cemetery – 2001
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1867 Anton and Lucyia Koszielsky deeded land near Yorktown for a Catholic burial ground to serve a growing immigrant community, and later families enlarged it and adorned it with a crucifixion monument and statuary. The spelling of the founders' name shifting from Koszielsky to Kozelski over the generations quietly records the assimilation of Central European Catholics into South Texas.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a tangible archive of the Polish and German Catholic immigration that shaped the culture of South Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades after the Civil War, the plains and post-oak country of South Texas were filling in fast. The Reconstruction and Gilded Age years brought new railroads, new markets for cattle and cotton, and a steady stream of European newcomers who saw in Texas cheap land and a fresh start. DeWitt County, with Yorktown near its western edge, was one of the places where that immigration took root and stayed.
Among the settlers were Catholic families from the German lands and from partitioned Poland — a region that in the 19th century was carved up among neighboring empires, giving many of its people powerful reasons to leave. They arrived with their faith intact and their parish life central to everything, and one of the first things a growing Catholic community needed was consecrated ground of its own.
By 1867, Yorktown's Catholic population had grown enough to need a proper burial place. That is the moment this cemetery records — a young immigrant congregation, only a few years past the war, setting aside land not for a season but for generations.
People & events
The story begins with Anton and Lucyia Koszielsky, who in 1867 deeded land to the Roman Catholic Church so their community would have a graveyard of its own. Anton was already past fifty by then; Lucyia would live on into the second decade of the next century. Their gift was the founding act, and everything that followed built on it.
Half a century later, in 1916, Jesse H. and Constantine Kozelski donated more acreage to enlarge the grounds — the same family name, now spelled a little differently, carrying the founders' work into a new generation. In 1937 a landscaping project reshaped the cemetery around a crucifixion monument given by Frank and Florentyna Jendrzey, and in 1979 Elizabeth Wollny added a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Read in sequence, those names and dates are a quiet family and community chronicle: a founding gift, an enlargement, a beautification, an act of devotion — each donated by a household with roots in the same Central European Catholic world, each leaving something durable behind.
Its place in the American story
America's story is often told through its ports of arrival, but just as much of it was written in places like this — the small inland communities where immigrants actually settled, farmed, worshiped, and were buried. A cemetery founded by newcomers is one of the surest signs that a community intended to stay, not merely to pass through.
The shift in a single surname's spelling, from Koszielsky to Kozelski across the generations named here, captures in miniature a process that played out in countless immigrant families nationwide: names softened toward American pronunciation, the old country receding by degrees even as its faith and customs endured. It is assimilation made visible in stone.
And it reflects the specific character of South Texas, where German and Polish Catholic settlement left a lasting cultural imprint — in churches, festivals, foodways, and family names — that still distinguishes the region today.
If you visit
A historic cemetery rewards slow walking. Move among the headstones and read the names and dates; you'll see the surnames and the Central European heritage the marker describes, and you may notice spellings drifting over the decades as families settled into Texas.
Look for the crucifixion monument at the heart of the grounds and the statue of the Blessed Virgin — the devotional focal points that the community added over time. They tell you this was a place tended with care, not just used.
Yorktown sits in the quiet ranch-and-farm country of DeWitt County, an easy pause on a South Texas drive. Come with a little patience and a respect for the place, and a burial ground becomes what it truly is: an open-air archive of the people who built the town around it.
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
- · Anton Koszielsky
- · Lucyia Koszielsky
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Holy Cross Catholic Church
Yorktown, TX
Polish Catholic families who first landed in Texas in the 1850s and settled the pioneering colony of Panna Maria later migrated to the Yorktown area, splitting from a largely German parish to form their own congregation. On land deeded in 1867 they built a church dedicated to St. Mary; after fire destroyed it in 1915, architect F. B. Gaenslen designed the present red-brick Romanesque building, completed in 1916 with much of the labor supplied by parishioners. It reused the cross from the old steeple, giving the church its name.
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Adolph Strieber, born in Zellerfeld, Germany, came to Texas as a boy through the port of Old Indianola in 1846. Like many Texas Germans who believed the Union should be preserved, he crossed Confederate lines on foot, by stagecoach, and by steamboat to enlist as a private in Springfield, Illinois, serving in Company G of the 16th Illinois Cavalry from 1863 to 1865. After the war he returned to Texas as a merchant and prominent citizen of Yorktown.
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Amid the great mid-nineteenth-century European migration to Texas, a small group of Lithuanians settled around Yorktown in DeWitt County—so thoroughly absorbed into the larger German community that their story was long forgotten. The first family, David and Dora Stanchos, arrived about 1852, making them among the earliest documented Lithuanian immigrants to America, and roughly seventy more followed by 1874, most from the Gumbinnen region of East Prussia. They farmed, became citizens, fought on both sides of the Civil War, and left their dead in the Jonischkies Cemetery south of town.
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