Littig Cemetery

🏛️The era

Littig came into being in the years after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades when formerly enslaved Americans were building new lives — and, wherever they could, new communities — out of hard-won freedom. In Travis County, on the blackland prairie east of Austin, that meant farming the rich soil and gathering around the institutions that made a place a home.

The town was laid out in 1883, and its location was no accident: it sat along the route of the Houston & Texas Central Railway. In this era the railroad was the difference between a settlement that grew and one that never took hold, and Littig was positioned to catch that current of commerce and connection.

What makes Littig extraordinary is who made it possible. The land was donated by Jackson Morrow, a formerly enslaved man — a detail that places this community squarely within the story of Black landownership in the post-emancipation South, one of the most hopeful and hardest-fought chapters of the era.

👥People & events

The founding act belongs to Jackson Morrow, who gave the land on which the town was platted in 1883; the townsite itself was named for A. B. Littig, the surveyor who laid it out. That a man born into slavery could donate the ground for a whole town speaks to determination, and to the brief window in which such advances were possible.

The cemetery followed in 1891, when Thomas B. and Mary E. Fowler sold two acres to trustees George Morrow, Alex Alexander, and Andrew J. Campbell for a community burial ground. Those trustees — Black men holding land in trust for their neighbors — embody the self-governance that defined freedmen's communities: they did not wait for others to provide, but organized and provided for themselves.

The earliest marked grave is that of Abba Moore, who died in 1895, and among the many buried here are numerous formerly enslaved people, including Jackson Morrow and members of his family. The town's population would thin in the mid-twentieth century, as so many rural communities did, but the cemetery remains active — a place still tended, still visited, still holding the community's memory.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Littig is part of one of the most important and least-told stories in American history: the freedmen's towns and settlements founded by formerly enslaved people after emancipation. Across the South, freedpeople pooled resources, bought land, and built self-governing communities with their own churches, schools, and cemeteries — asserting through property and institutions a citizenship the wider society was often unwilling to grant.

The fact that a formerly enslaved man donated the land for the townsite makes Littig a powerful example of that movement. Black landownership was both an economic foundation and a political statement in the post-Civil War era, and it was frequently precarious — which is part of why so many of these communities later declined, their populations drawn away or their footholds eroded over generations.

That is what gives the cemetery its outsized importance. As the marker recognizes, when a freedmen's town fades, its burial ground is often the most durable record left of it. The names in this ground preserve a community that formal history books have too often overlooked, making Littig Cemetery a monument to a whole chapter of the American experience.

🧭If you visit

Littig Cemetery lies on the prairie east of Austin, in Travis County, and it remains active — so you'll find a place that is cared for and living, not abandoned. Approach it knowing what it represents: the enduring heart of a freedmen's town founded on land given by a man who had himself been enslaved.

Look for the founding family. Jackson Morrow and members of his family rest here, alongside many others who were formerly enslaved — the very people who built this community with their own hands and resources. Seek out the older stones, and you can trace the community back toward Abba Moore's 1895 grave, the earliest marked burial.

Let the setting register. The town that once stood along the railway has largely thinned away, and the cemetery is what remains — which is precisely why it matters. Walking these rows is one of the most direct ways to encounter a freedmen's town, a story more often lost than preserved.

It makes a meaningful stop on a drive through the historic Black communities of Central Texas east of Austin. Come with the respect a still-active burial ground deserves, read the names carefully, and remember that each one is a thread back to people who turned freedom into a community of their own making.