Navidad Baptist Cemetery
Schulenburg, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1853, Seth F. and Caroline M. Hazel deeded land to trustees of Navidad Baptist Church and Cemetery. This cemetery served the residents of the pioneer community of Lyons, whether or not they were members of the Navidad Baptist Church. The community was established by the 1840s on land originally granted in 1831 to Kesiah Crier. In the 1870s, however, most businesses and members of the community moved north toward the new railroad town of Schulenburg, and Lyons soon ceased to exist, although some residents continued to live in the area. The oldest known burial in the cemetery dates to 1853. Many of those interred here are early Texas pioneers, including relatives of the Old Three Hundred, the first families Stephen F. Austin settled in Texas. In addition, veterans of conflicts dating to the Texas Revolution are buried here. Today, though the community of Lyons is gone, the cemetery remains an important reminder of the early town. The burial ground chronicles the lives of area pioneers. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1853 Seth and Caroline Hazel deeded land for the Navidad Baptist Church and its cemetery, serving the pioneer community of Lyons, which had grown up in the 1840s on a grant first made to Kesiah Crier in 1831. When the railroad drew business north to Schulenburg in the 1870s, Lyons withered away, but its cemetery endured. Among those buried here are early Texas pioneers—including relatives of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred—and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Texas Revolution.
Why it matters
The cemetery is nearly all that remains of the vanished town of Lyons, a ghost town whose story shows how the railroad made and unmade frontier Texas communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1853, when Seth F. and Caroline M. Hazel deeded land for the Navidad Baptist Church and its cemetery, this corner of Fayette County was frontier Texas in the days of the early Republic and young statehood. The community it served — the pioneer town of Lyons — had grown up by the 1840s, part of the great settlement wave that filled the fertile country between the Colorado and the coast.
The land's story reaches back even further, to an 1831 grant made to Kesiah Crier, from the era when settlers were first being placed on Texas soil under Mexican rule. In one small tract, then, you have the whole opening chapter of Anglo-American Texas: a grant of the 1830s, a community of the 1840s, and a burial ground consecrated in the 1850s.
This was hopeful country. People cleared land, raised churches, and buried their dead with every expectation that the town they were building would last. For a while, it did.
People & events
The Hazels' gift in 1853 was an act of communal generosity: the cemetery served all the residents of Lyons, whether or not they belonged to the Navidad Baptist Church. On a frontier where death came often and without regard for congregation, that open welcome mattered. The oldest known burial dates to that same year, 1853.
Those resting here are the people who made early Texas. The marker tells us many are pioneers, including relatives of the Old Three Hundred — the first families that Stephen F. Austin settled in Texas, the founding cohort of Anglo colonization. Alongside them lie veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Texas Revolution itself, men who had helped win the independence of the Republic in whose soil they were buried.
Then came the turn that unmade the town. In the 1870s the railroad arrived to the north, and with it the new town of Schulenburg. Businesses and families followed the tracks, as they did all across America in the rail age, and Lyons — bypassed — soon ceased to exist. Some residents lingered in the area, but the town itself faded from the map, leaving the cemetery behind as its most enduring witness.
Its place in the American story
Lyons is a ghost town, and its fate is one of the most American stories there is. In the second half of the nineteenth century the railroad decided which communities lived and which died. A town on the line boomed; a town a few miles off it withered, no matter how established it had been. Schulenburg rose and Lyons vanished for no deeper reason than the route the tracks happened to take.
The graves here also connect a quiet country cemetery to the very origins of Anglo-American Texas. To lie near relatives of the Old Three Hundred is to be tied directly to Stephen F. Austin's founding colony — the beginning of the settlement story that led to the Republic and, eventually, to statehood.
Together those two facts frame the whole arc of frontier Texas: the railroad that made and unmade communities, and the pioneer generation that started it all. A place that no longer appears on the map turns out to hold both ends of the story.
If you visit
Come understanding what you're really visiting: not a town, but almost all that remains of one. The community of Lyons is gone, and this cemetery is its last standing chapter — which gives even a short walk here a quiet, elegiac weight.
Look to the oldest stones, back toward that first 1853 burial, and read them as the record of pioneers who came to build something permanent. Some of them were kin to Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred; some were veterans of the Texas Revolution. These are the founding names of Anglo Texas, resting in a field that outlived the town they called home.
For a road tripper, this is the reflective counterpoint to a lively stop in nearby Schulenburg — the very railroad town that drew Lyons's life away in the 1870s. Visit both and you'll feel the whole bargain of the rail age in a single afternoon: one town's rise written directly over another's disappearance.
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
- · Seth F. Hazel
- · Caroline M. Hazel
- · Kesiah Crier
- · Stephen F. Austin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Former Town of Lyons
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Laid out on Keziah Cryer's land grant, the town of Lyons took its name from settler James Lyons, killed in an 1837 Comanche raid that also carried off his son Warren. By the 1860s Lyons had stores, a Masonic lodge, school, and post office and sat on the wartime 'Cotton Road' to Mexico—but it withered in the 1870s when the Southern Pacific Railroad bypassed it.
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