Progressive & Modern Era

Immaculate Conception Cemetery

McCook, Hidalgo County, Texas

Marker Inscription

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION CEMETERY DESCENDANTS OF SILESIANS THAT SETTLED THE OLDEST POLISH COLONY IN AMERICA, PANNA MARIA, TEXAS, BEGAN SETTLING McCOOK IN 1926 AS FARMERS AND RANCHERS. IN 1936, THE DALLAS JOINT STOCK LAND BANK DONATED FOUR ACRES TO ESTABLISH A CHURCH. THE GOTHIC-REVIVAL STYLE CHURCH WAS DEDICATED IN 1950. LAND FOR THE CEMETERY WAS DONATED IN 1949 BY SYLVIA AND AUGUST SKLOSS, DIRECT DESCENDANTS OF THE LEOPOLD MOCZYGEMBA FAMILY WHO BEGAN THE MOVE TO AMERICA. THE FIRST BURIAL IN THE CEMETERY IS THAT OF NANCY PRUKOP IN 1953. VETERANS FROM WORLD WAR I, WORLD WAR II AND THE KOREAN WAR ARE BURIED IN THE CEMETERY. THIS HISTORIC CEMETERY IS A TESTAMENT TO THE PIONEER SETTLERS OF THE McCOOK AREA. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2010

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

McCook was settled beginning in 1926 by farming and ranching families who descended from the Silesian immigrants of Panna Maria, the oldest Polish colony in America. A land bank donated ground for a church in 1936, and after a Gothic-revival church rose in 1950 the adjoining cemetery—on land given by descendants of the Moczygemba family—received its first burial in 1953. Veterans of both World Wars and the Korean War rest here among the pioneer settlers.

Why it matters

The cemetery carries the story of Polish-American migration across generations, from Panna Maria's founding colony to a farming community on the South Texas plains.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

To understand this cemetery on the South Texas plains, you have to start in Central Europe. In 1854 a group of immigrants from Silesia — a region long fought over and, in that era, under Prussian rule — sailed for Texas and founded Panna Maria, remembered as the oldest permanent Polish colony in America. They came for land and religious freedom, and they endured drought, poverty, and hardship to stay.

Those families did not remain in one place. Over the following generations their descendants spread across Texas, farming and ranching, carrying their faith and their surnames with them. By the 1920s the Rio Grande Valley and the ranch country north of it were being opened to new settlement, and that is what drew this particular group.

Beginning in 1926, descendants of those original Silesian colonists started settling the McCook area as farmers and ranchers. They arrived as the country moved from the prosperity of the 1920s into the Great Depression — a hard time to build a community from scratch, which makes what they accomplished all the more striking.

People & events

The community built itself in careful, documented steps. In 1936, in the depths of the Depression, the Dallas Joint Stock Land Bank donated four acres so the settlers could establish a church. Money was scarce and progress was slow; the Gothic-revival church they envisioned was not dedicated until 1950, roughly a decade and a half after the ground was given.

The cemetery came from within the community itself. In 1949 Sylvia and August Skloss — direct descendants of the Leopold Moczygemba family, the line tied to the very beginning of the move to America — donated the land for it. The first person laid to rest there was Nancy Prukop, in 1953, and with that burial the ground became what it remains: the community's memory made physical.

Walk the rows and you meet the twentieth century. Veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean War are buried here, men who left these farms and ranches to serve and came home to rest among their own. In 2010 the site was formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, an acknowledgment of the pioneer families it holds.

Its place in the American story

This is a small, specific place that connects to one of the great themes of American history: chain migration across generations. The people here did not come straight from Europe. They came from an older American settlement — Panna Maria — founded by immigrants who had crossed decades earlier, and they carried that heritage to a new frontier. It's migration as a relay, one American generation handing the journey to the next.

It also preserves a strand of American ethnic history that surprises people. Texas is not the first place most Americans associate with Polish settlement, yet the oldest Polish colony in the country is here, and communities like McCook are its living branches. The Silesian identity — Polish, Catholic, shaped by Central Europe's shifting borders — took root in the Texas soil and held.

And like countless rural cemeteries across the nation, this one quietly binds a farming community's story to the country's wars. The veterans buried here tie a small Catholic settlement of immigrant descendants directly to the American century.

If you visit

McCook is ranch-and-farm country, open and quiet, the kind of place where the land itself sets the mood. A historic cemetery out here rewards the traveler who slows down. Come expecting stillness rather than spectacle.

Look first at the surnames on the stones. Names carried from Silesia by way of Panna Maria repeat across the plots, and reading them is the fastest way to feel the family threads that founded this place — including the descendants of the family the marker names. Notice, too, the veterans' markers scattered among them, spanning three of the century's wars.

If the Gothic-revival church still stands nearby, take it in from the outside; a pointed-arch country church on the South Texas plains is a small architectural surprise, an echo of Europe set against wide sky. To make a route of it, this pairs naturally with a longer pilgrimage south to Panna Maria itself — visit the mother colony and this daughter community and you've traced a piece of Polish-American history across more than a century and many miles of Texas.

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

· Leopold Moczygemba
· Nancy Prukop

Themes & tags

ImmigrationMemorial

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