Oaklawn Cemetery
Somerville, Burleson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Dating to 1900, this graveyard was first called the Somerville and Lyons Cemetery. Land was purchased by J. W. Lauderdale to establish a cemetery upon the death of his two-year-old son Charles on November 6, 1900. The name was changed to Oaklawn Cemetery in 1913. Among the more than 2000 burials are 22 Civil War veterans, 20 children between 1900-1905, and victims of a typhoid fever epidemic in 1903. The construction of the dam at Somerville in 1963 caused 16 people to be reinterred here from other graveyards. The cemetery is still in use. (1996) (Historic Texas Cemetery medallion added 2002)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Burleson County cemetery began in 1900 when J. W. Lauderdale bought land to bury his two-year-old son, and was renamed Oaklawn in 1913. Among its more than two thousand graves are 22 Civil War veterans, a cluster of children who died in 1900–1905, and victims of a 1903 typhoid epidemic. When the Somerville dam was built in 1963, sixteen people were reinterred here from other graveyards.
Why it matters
Its rows record the everyday tolls of small-town Texas life—epidemic, child mortality, and the aging of the Civil War generation—in a single burial ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, Burleson County was farm and railroad country. Somerville was a young town that had grown up along the rail line, and the families who lived there worked the land, the tracks, and the small businesses that served them both. Life in a place like this was close-knit, and it was fragile in ways that are hard to picture today.
In 1900, rural Texas had few of the protections we now take for granted. There were no antibiotics and no vaccines for many common diseases, and clean water was far from guaranteed. Childhood illnesses and waterborne diseases such as typhoid fever could move through a community quickly. A town's cemetery often filled faster than anyone wanted.
The generation that had fought in the Civil War was also growing old by then. Veterans who had marched as young men in the 1860s were now grandfathers, and in towns across the South they were being buried in new community cemeteries like this one. Each of these burial grounds became a record of both the war's long reach and the ordinary hardships of small-town life.
People & events
This cemetery began with a loss. When J. W. Lauderdale's two-year-old son Charles died in November 1900, Lauderdale bought land so that the boy could be buried, and that land became the community's graveyard. It was first called the Somerville and Lyons Cemetery, a name that tied it to the town and the neighboring settlement, and it became Oaklawn Cemetery in 1913.
The early years were hard. According to the marker, twenty children were buried here between 1900 and 1905, and a typhoid fever epidemic in 1903 added more graves. Those numbers stand for families in a small town who grieved together, sometimes several times over.
The cemetery also holds twenty-two Civil War veterans, men whose lives stretched from the days of the Confederacy into the new century. Then, in the 1960s, came a very different kind of upheaval. Building the dam at Somerville, which created the lake that now spreads west of town, meant flooding land that held older graves, and sixteen people were moved here and reburied. Today Oaklawn has more than two thousand burials and is still in use, so the town's story keeps being written in it.
Its place in the American story
Oaklawn is a small-town cemetery, but it holds several of the big forces that shaped America between 1900 and the 1960s. Its children's graves and typhoid victims are reminders of how deadly everyday life was before modern medicine and public sanitation. The national push for clean water and disease control in the early twentieth century came out of losses like these, repeated in thousands of communities.
The Civil War veterans buried here show how long the war lasted in American memory. Decades after the fighting ended, towns like Somerville were still burying the men who had taken part, and their graves kept that history in front of later generations.
Then there is the dam. In the mid-twentieth century, federal flood-control and water-supply projects reshaped Texas rivers and the communities along them. When older burial grounds sat in the path of the rising water, the dead were sometimes moved too. The sixteen reburials at Oaklawn are a quiet, personal record of a huge national building effort.
If you visit
Come slowly and walk the rows. Look at the dates on the older stones and you may start to see the clusters the marker describes: the small graves from the first years of the 1900s, and the dates around 1903 that may point to the typhoid epidemic. Headstones like these tell a community's history more directly than most books can.
Keep an eye out for veterans' markers and for the Historic Texas Cemetery medallion, which was added in 2002 to recognize the cemetery's significance. Because the cemetery is still active, remember that families visit here to grieve. Stay on the paths and be quiet and respectful around recent graves.
Oaklawn fits easily into a drive through Burleson County, especially paired with a visit to Somerville Lake. Seeing the lake first, then standing among the reinterred graves it caused, connects the landscape to the people who once lived where the water now lies.
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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Themes & tags
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