King Cemetery
Gonzales, Gonzales County, Texas
Marker Inscription
KING CEMETERY LOCATED ON A HILL OVERLOOKING KING FLATS ON THE GUADALUPE RIVER, THIS CEMETERY HAS SERVED THE AREA SINCE THE 1830s. JOHN GLADDEN KING, A MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL OF GOVERNMENT OF THE DEWITT COLONY, AND HIS WIFE, PARMELIA, SETTLED ON THIS LAND IN 1830. THE EARLIEST MARKED GRAVE IS THAT OF WILLIAM G. HALL, THE FIRSTBORN OF ROBERT AND MARY KING HALL, WHO WAS JUST TWO DAYS OLD WHEN HE PASSED IN 1838. SEVEN GENERATIONS OF THE KING FAMILY ARE BURIED HERE. VETERANS FROM THE TEXAS REVOLUTION, WAR OF 1812, CIVIL WAR, WORLD WAR II AND KOREAN WAR HAVE BEEN LAID TO REST IN THIS CEMETERY ALONG WITH SEVERAL TEXAS RANGERS. THE KING CEMETERY IS A SIGNIFICANT CHRONICLE OF THE FRONTIER SETTLEMENT OF GONZALES COUNTY. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Perched on a hill above King Flats on the Guadalupe River, this burial ground has served the area since the 1830s, when John Gladden King—a member of the DeWitt Colony's governing council—and his wife Parmelia settled the land in 1830. The oldest marked grave belongs to two-day-old William G. Hall, who died in 1838, and seven generations of the King family rest here. Among the graves lie Texas Rangers and veterans of conflicts spanning the War of 1812 through the Korean War.
Why it matters
A single family cemetery can trace the whole arc of Texas frontier settlement, from the DeWitt Colony pioneers through generations of soldiers and Rangers.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand at King Cemetery, on its hill above King Flats and the Guadalupe River, is to look out over the ground where Anglo Texas began. In 1830, when John Gladden King and his wife Parmelia settled this land, Texas was still part of Mexico, and Americans came only by invitation, as colonists under agreements with the Mexican government. This was the empresario era, when whole colonies were planted along the rivers of south-central Texas by men who promised to bring settlers and impose order on the frontier.
Gonzales County lay near the heart of that experiment. The families who came were not tourists or speculators passing through; they were staking their futures on unbroken country, building cabins, breaking fields, and burying their dead in ground they hoped their descendants would keep. A cemetery begun in the 1830s is, quite literally, as old as the settlement itself.
What followed in the next few years would shake this whole region — revolution, war, and the birth of a republic — and the people resting on this hill lived through all of it. The cemetery is not a monument set apart from that history. It is a direct, unbroken thread running out of it.
People & events
John Gladden King anchors the story. He served on the council of government of the DeWitt Colony — one of the formal bodies through which the colonists managed their affairs — which places him not at the edge of the settlement but at its center, among the people making decisions for the community. He and Parmelia put down roots here in 1830, and roots is the right word: seven generations of the King family are buried on this hill.
The earliest marked grave carries the most tender story of all. It belongs to William G. Hall, the firstborn child of Robert and Mary King Hall, who lived only two days before he died in 1838. In a single small headstone you have the whole arc of frontier life — the joining of families through marriage, the hope invested in a first child, and the heartbreaking fragility of infancy on the early frontier, where a two-day-old's grave could become the oldest marker in a cemetery that would serve the area for generations.
Around that first small grave the community gathered its dead across nearly two centuries. Among them lie several Texas Rangers and veterans of a remarkable span of conflicts — the Texas Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War. Each of those graves is a life, and together they read like a roll call of the eras Texas passed through.
Its place in the American story
A family burial ground might seem like the most local thing imaginable, and yet this one quietly tells the national story. The DeWitt Colony was part of the great Anglo-American migration into Texas that, within a few short years of King's arrival, would collide with Mexico and erupt into the Texas Revolution — the fight that produced an independent republic and, eventually, statehood. To have served on that colony's council is to have had a hand, however modest, in one of the pivotal chapters of the American westward story.
The span of veterans buried here widens the frame even further. A single hillside holds men who fought in the War of 1812, when the young United States was still proving it could survive, and men who served in Korea, in the atomic age. Laid end to end, those service records trace nearly a century and a half of American history — the same family ground receiving each generation as its wars came and went.
That is the deeper significance the marker names: this cemetery is a chronicle. It shows how the settlement of the American frontier was not an event but a continuity, carried forward by families who stayed, generation after generation, and by the soldiers and Rangers among them who kept answering the country's call.
If you visit
The setting is the first gift. The cemetery sits on a hill overlooking King Flats and the Guadalupe River, and that vantage is not an accident — high, well-drained ground with a view was exactly what pioneers chose for a burial place. Take a moment to look out the way the first mourners here would have, at the river bottom that fed the settlement below.
As you walk, read the stones as a timeline rather than a list. Seek out the sense of the oldest graves from the 1830s and let your eye travel forward through the decades; you are moving through the entire life of a frontier community in a few dozen steps. Somewhere among them is the tiny marker for a child who lived two days in 1838 — the beginning of everything the place became.
Notice, too, the veterans' graves and any that recall the Texas Rangers, and remember that they span from the earliest American wars to the twentieth century. This is a working historic cemetery, recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, so treat it with the quiet respect a family plot deserves — tread lightly, photograph gently, and leave everything as you found it. On a road trip through Gonzales County, it makes a moving, contemplative stop: a hilltop where the whole span of Texas settlement rests under the open sky.
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
- · John Gladden King
- · Parmelia King
- · William G. Hall
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
James Hodges, Sr.
Gonzales, TX
James Hodges, Sr. arrived at Gonzales in April 1835 and quickly bought four leagues of land at the forks of the San Marcos and Guadalupe Rivers, paying three thousand dollars in silver. That autumn the townspeople elected him a delegate to the Consultation of 1835, the convention that created a provisional government and placed Sam Houston over a new Texas army. He supplied the army in 1836, fled with his family during the Runaway Scrape, and later returned to serve on the county's land commission and raise his family on the rivers.
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Near this spot on October 2, 1835, Texas colonists answered the Mexican government's demand to surrender their small cannon with a defiant "come and take it." The skirmish at Gonzales — the "first shot" of the Texas Revolution — sent Mexican troops retreating toward Bexar and set the colonies on the road to independence. This granite-and-bronze monument, designed by Waldine Tauch, was raised generations later to mark the ground.
First Shot of the Texas Revolution
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A mile and a half from here, on October 2, 1835, Texan colonists under Col. John H. Moore fired a small cannon at Mexican troops — the opening shot of the Texas Revolution. The confrontation at Gonzales over that very cannon crystallized the colonists' defiance and launched the fight for Texas independence.
Augustus H. Jones
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