Live Oak Cemetery
Killeen, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Although an inventory of marked gravesites indicates that the first person buried here was Michael Young, local tradition claims that distinction actually belongs to Young's daughter. She is believed to have died of sickness near this location during the family's westward journey from Alabama and buried here prior to her father's interment in 1875. At that time, this particular piece of land was still state public land. It was not until 1886 that it passed into the private ownership of John O. Rhea. The first legal documentation of Live Oak Cemetery is contained in a deed transfering 3.9 acres of land for cemetery purposes from a subsequent owner, P.C. Mitchell, to cemetery trustees in 1901. At that time the cemetery contained about 40 burials. The dates appearing on tombstones suggest that this cemetery has been in continuous use since 1875. By 1990 it contained about 435 marked and unmarked graves. This cemetery is closely associated with the community of Youngsport, reportedly named for Michael Young. Live Oak Cemetery, together with the Boone-Hamlin Cemetery, continues to actively serve the Youngsport community and is maintained by a local cemetery association. (1992)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Live Oak Cemetery near Killeen traces its beginnings to about 1875, when the Young family, traveling west from Alabama, buried a daughter who died of sickness along the way — soon followed by her father, Michael Young. First formally deeded for burials in 1901, the ground grew to hundreds of graves and gave its story to the nearby community of Youngsport. It remains in use and cared for by a local cemetery association.
Why it matters
Roadside family graves like this one mark the human cost of America's westward migration, where a single burial could seed a whole community.
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Related people
- · Michael Young
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Youngsport
Killeen, TX
Michael Young settled this stretch of the Lampasas River around 1851, reportedly having stopped to care for a sick daughter who died and was buried in what became Live Oak Cemetery. A former ship captain, he is said to have named the place Youngsport because he had finally found his port. The community gained a post office in 1871, supported stores, a blacksmith, and churches by 1900, but faded as nearby Killeen drew away its trade; by 2005 only cemeteries and a church remained.
Sharp Cemetery and Rock Creek Baptist Church of Christ
Killeen, TX
This cemetery began as a family burial ground when the Sharp family, having moved to the Lampasas River country in 1859, laid their six-year-old daughter Sarah to rest here in 1864. In 1879 the widowed Emily Sharp deeded three acres to create a community cemetery, and neighboring families gave land for a church and school, leading to the founding of the Rock Creek Baptist Church of Christ in 1882. The oldest graves, some marked only with field stones and ringed by nineteenth-century rock fences, hold the settlers, war veterans, and lost children of a young Central Texas community.
McBryde Cemetery
Killeen vicinity, TX
When Mancel T. McBryde brought his family from Georgia to Bell County in the early 1860s, the Texas frontier was still a place where families made their own institutions—including where to lay their dead. Upon his wife Jane's death in 1885, he chose a rise south of the family home for her grave, beginning a burial ground that gathered McBryde and Hoover descendants, their graves facing east and the oldest ringed in stone. Kin still tend it today.
Cedar Knob Cemetery (HTC)
Salado, TX
The first settlers along the Lampasas River basin were veterans who took land grants after Texas independence and stockmen seeking grassland for their herds. This cemetery below Cedar Knob Mountain grew from an 1858 homestead burial and a donation of land by Silas Burks in the 1870s, gathering pioneers who arrived by wagon caravan from as far as Missouri. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers relocated it and nine other cemeteries here ahead of the Stillhouse dam, consolidating burials dating to the late 1840s.