Lueders Cemetery
Lueders, Jones County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The town of Lueders lies along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, on land given by the State of Texas to heirs of Frederick Luders, a German immigrant who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Early area settlers included U.S. Indian Agent Jess Stem, who homesteaded a few miles south of here in 1852. Ranching was the dominant activity in the latter 19th century. In 1900, the Webb and Hill Land and Cattle Company bought the Goethe & Fuchs Ranch on the Clear Fork and developed the town of Lueders. In the same year, limestone rock quarries opened and the Texas Central Railroad extended their tracks here from Albany. The new community soon had a school, post office, cotton gins and businesses. A graveyard in a pasture near Rhomberg Street served Lueders citizens from about 1902-06. Hand digging graves at that site became impractical because of thick layers of limestone. In 1907, John M. Roberts, Clark Henry King and Mrs. E.V. Risley donated land for a new Lueders Cemetery, also later known as Clear Fork Cemetery. The site abutted the railroad tracks of the Texas Central (later the MKT). For many years, pallbearers carried caskets up the railroad embankment and down the other side to the burial plots. An open-sided tabernacle on the north side of the cemetery was used for memorial services in the early years. The earliest burial is the unnamed infant daughter of George and Cate Risley. Hundreds of pioneer settlers, area residents and veterans of conflicts dating from the Civil War are buried here. Cemetery features include granite, marble, concrete, and wooden gravestones, with Lueders limestone grave markers also prominent. Lueders Cemetery remains a chronicle of the past and an important part of the community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The town of Lueders rose along the Clear Fork of the Brazos on land granted to the heirs of Frederick Luders, a German immigrant who fought at San Jacinto. Ranching gave way to a boom in 1900 when limestone quarries opened and the Texas Central Railroad reached the new townsite. Because thick limestone made grave-digging impractical at an earlier site, landowners donated ground for this cemetery in 1907; for years pallbearers carried caskets over the adjacent railroad embankment to reach the plots.
Why it matters
Lueders Cemetery captures how railroads, immigrant land grants, and the local stone trade combined to build—and bury—a West Texas ranching town.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Frederick Luders
- · Jess Stem
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Western Cattle Trail Crossings at Fort Griffin, The
Albany, TX
After the Civil War, Texas cattlemen sought new routes to northern railheads, and in 1874 John T. Lytle blazed what became the Western (or Dodge City) Trail, driving 3,500 longhorns from South Texas toward Nebraska. Fort Griffin became a vital watering and supply point as herds crossed the Clear Fork of the Brazos here and at nearby fords. Within a few years the Western Trail carried the bulk of Texas cattle north—three to five million head in all—until the last drive in 1893.
Josselet Switch
Haskell, TX
Belgian immigrant Victor Josselet joined his brothers in coming to America in 1873, working as Chicago coal miners before farming in Texas, and in 1900 bought a large tract near Haskell to ranch and raise a family of nine. When the Wichita Valley Railroad reached Haskell in 1906, Josselet sold the line a strip for a siding, and "Josselet Switch" became an important cattle-shipping point to the Fort Worth and Kansas City stockyards. The switch gained a depot, store, and fuel station, and much of the original land is still worked by his descendants.
Ragland Building
Sweetwater, TX
Community leader R. A. Ragland raised this hand-hewn limestone building in Sweetwater in 1901, adding a second story in 1906. Over the decades its floors held a remarkable range of West Texas commerce and services—a blacksmith shop, a hardware store, law and abstract offices, a Western Union telegraph office, a cotton exporter, doctors, and even a sanatorium. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1979.
Trammell House
Sweetwater, TX
A rancher and banker who helped bring the railroads to Sweetwater, and who was remembered as the town's founding father, commissioned this distinctive house in the early 1910s from a California architect whose work he knew through the Santa Fe Railway. Built in a Mission Revival and Prairie School style around a central atrium, the home later did double duty as the area's only hospital from 1923 to 1936 before returning to family use.