Roberts Cemetery
Hockley, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Abraham (Abram) Roberts (1773-1850), a member of Stephen F. Austin's Colony, came to Texas in the late 1820s with his children, naming the area in which he settled New Kentucky. By the 1840s the area was known as the Spring Creek community and was settled by German immigrants. The first burial on this site is thought to have been that of Abraham Roberts. Though it is uncertain when the Roberts land began to be used for community burials, the earliest was probably that of infant Mary Schultz, who was born and died in 1858. The oldest surviving headstone is that of her young mother, Elizabeth M. Schultz, who died in 1859. Other notable graves include that of Abraham Roberts' son George (1811-1874) and those of the Montgomery family. A separate burial ground nearby is thought to have been given to the slaves of the Montgomery plantation by Abraham Roberts. C. A. Montgomery, who acquired the land from Abraham Roberts, deeded 202 acres to Henry Klabe (Kleb) in 1887, reserving two acres as the Roberts graveyard. The two-acre tract, often called "The Old Roberts Burial Ground," and an additional acre were deeded to the community for continued use in 1919. A 1997 count revealed 258 marked and 15 unmarked graves in the cemetery. Cared for by family members until the Roberts Cemetery Association was formed in 1971, the graveyard continues to serve the community. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Abraham Roberts, a member of Stephen F. Austin's Colony, came to Texas in the late 1820s and named his settlement New Kentucky; by the 1840s it had become the German-settled Spring Creek community. His own burial around 1850 is thought to be the first here, and the ground grew into a community cemetery holding the Roberts, Schultz, and Montgomery families. A nearby separate burial ground is believed to have been set aside for enslaved people of the Montgomery plantation, and the graveyard remains in use today.
Why it matters
The cemetery layers together the Anglo settlers of Austin's Colony, later German immigrants, and enslaved African Americans — the intertwined peoples who built early Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The oldest layer of this ground reaches back to the very beginnings of Anglo-American Texas. In the 1820s, Stephen F. Austin brought the first authorized colonists — the settlers later remembered as Austin's Colony — into what was then Mexican Texas, offering land to families willing to farm and take root. Abraham Roberts was one of those early arrivals, coming with his children in the late 1820s and naming his new home New Kentucky, a small act of memory that carried an older frontier westward in name.
By the 1840s the character of the place was already changing. A wave of German immigration was reshaping the Texas countryside, and the settlement around Roberts's land became known as the Spring Creek community, now home to German families as well as the original Anglo settlers. This was the pattern across much of early Texas: one frontier population layered atop another within a single generation.
Underneath and alongside all of it lay the harsher reality of the antebellum South. The plantation economy reached into this corner of Texas, and enslaved people lived and labored — and were buried — on the same land the settlers were claiming and clearing. A cemetery that grew here would end up holding all of these stories at once.
People & events
Abraham Roberts lived a long life spanning the Revolutionary era and the age of American westward expansion, and he ended it here. His own burial, thought to be around 1850, is believed to be the first on this site — the seed from which a community graveyard grew. It is uncertain exactly when the land began to serve as a public burying ground, but the record of loss is painfully clear in its oldest stones.
The earliest burial was probably that of the infant Mary Schultz, born and died in 1858; the oldest surviving headstone belongs to her young mother, Elizabeth, who died the very next year. A mother and her baby, gone within months of each other, are among the first names the cemetery preserves — a reminder of how fragile life was on the nineteenth-century frontier, especially for the young. Roberts's own son George lies here as well, along with members of the Montgomery family.
The land changed hands as families and fortunes shifted. C. A. Montgomery, who acquired the property from Roberts, later deeded most of it to Henry Klabe (Kleb) in 1887 but carefully reserved two acres as the Roberts graveyard, and in 1919 that tract and an additional acre were given to the community for continued use. Nearby, a separate burial ground is believed to have been set aside by Roberts for the enslaved people of the Montgomery plantation. Long tended by descendants and, since 1971, by a cemetery association, the graveyard still serves the community; a 1997 count recorded hundreds of graves, marked and unmarked alike.
Its place in the American story
A country cemetery like this one is a small, honest map of how America was actually settled. In a few acres it holds the Anglo pioneers of Austin's Colony, the German immigrants who followed them, and the enslaved African Americans whose labor underwrote the plantation economy — the intertwined peoples who built early Texas, resting in the same soil they lived and worked on.
The separate burial ground believed to have been given for enslaved people speaks to one of the nation's deepest and most painful truths. Even in death, the divisions of a slaveholding society were preserved in the landscape, and the unmarked graves counted here stand for countless people across the South whose names the written record never kept. Recognizing and caring for such ground is part of how a community reckons honestly with its whole past, not only the parts commemorated in stone.
There is also the quieter national story of continuity and remembrance. That descendants tended these graves for over a century before formally organizing to protect them, and that the land was deliberately reserved and re-deeded across ownership changes, shows a very American impulse: ordinary families insisting that the people who came before them not be forgotten, and keeping a shared place alive across generations.
If you visit
Come to a place like this expecting quiet. A community cemetery invites slow walking and close reading — the names, the dates, the way a cluster of stones can tell you which families lived and grieved together. Here you can trace the layers the marker describes: the settler founder, the German families of the Spring Creek community, the Montgomerys, and the sorrowful early graves of a mother and her infant.
Read the ground as carefully as the stones. The presence of both marked and unmarked graves, and of a separate nearby burial area, is part of what this place has to teach; the empty spaces and the plainer plots carry as much meaning as the carved headstones. Walk gently and with respect — this is sacred, working ground, still serving the families connected to it.
As a road-trip stop, a cemetery like this pairs naturally with the surrounding countryside and its stories of early colonization and immigration. Give it time rather than a quick photo. Standing among these graves, you are looking at nearly the entire arc of the community's history gathered into one small, well-tended field.
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
- · Abraham Roberts
- · C. A. Montgomery
- · Henry Klabe (Kleb)
Related events
- · Stephen F. Austin's Colony
Themes & tags
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