Six Mile Cemetery
Port Lavaca, Calhoun County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first known grave in Czech-German settlement on Marekville was that of Veranka Drgac (1817-1897). The five-acre graveyard was deeded to the Marekville cemetery association by the Phillips Investment Company in 1899. The area became known as the Six Mile Community around 1907; the cemetery name changed accordingly. Graves of interest include that of Anton Machacek (1856-1931), who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army before immigrating to the United States. Veterans of major American and international conflicts also are interred here. An October 1997 count recorded more than 350 marked graves in the cemetery, which continues to serve the community. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This five-acre burial ground served the Czech-German farming settlement first known as Marekville, with its earliest grave dating to 1897. Formally deeded to a cemetery association in 1899, it took the Six Mile name as the community renamed itself around 1907. Among those resting here is Anton Machacek, who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army before immigrating, alongside veterans of American and world conflicts.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a quiet record of Central European immigrants who brought Old World roots to the Texas coast and folded into the American story across generations of service.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years after the Civil War and on into the early twentieth century, the Texas coastal plain drew waves of newcomers from Central Europe. Czech and German families, many of them farmers, crossed an ocean to work land that promised more than the crowded, hard-pressed villages they had left behind. They arrived as strangers and set about the slow work of making a home.
Building a community meant building all of its institutions at once — a place to worship, a place to teach the children, and, inevitably, a place to bury the dead. A cemetery is often among the first permanent marks a settlement makes on the land, the moment a group of migrants becomes rooted people who will stay.
The settlement here was first known as Marekville, a Czech-German farming community on the Texas coast. Its early history can be read in the ground itself, in a five-acre burial place that would grow alongside the living community around it and outlast every one of its founders.
People & events
The story of this ground begins with Veranka Drgac, born in 1817, whose grave — from 1897 — is the earliest known here. That she lived eighty years and died in Texas tells its own quiet tale of a life that likely began in the Old World and ended in the new. Two years after her burial, in 1899, the Phillips Investment Company formally deeded the five acres to the local cemetery association, turning a burial spot into a lasting institution.
Around 1907 the community renamed itself Six Mile, and the cemetery took the new name along with it — a small, telling detail of how a graveyard's identity is bound up with the living people it serves. Among those who rest here is Anton Machacek, born in 1856, who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army before immigrating to the United States, carrying the mark of Old World service to a new country.
Machacek is not alone in that. The marker notes that veterans of major American and international conflicts are buried here as well, so that a single country cemetery holds soldiers of more than one nation's wars. A count in October 1997 recorded more than 350 marked graves, and the cemetery continues to serve the community that grew up around it.
Its place in the American story
Small immigrant cemeteries like this one are among the most honest records America keeps of itself. The great story of Central European immigration is usually told through cities and factories, but much of it actually happened out on the land, in farming settlements that left few headlines and one enduring archive: their burial grounds. Read the names and dates here and you read the arc of a migration.
The presence of a man who once wore an Austro-Hungarian uniform, resting near veterans of American conflicts, captures the whole immigrant passage in a single acre. These were people who carried one country's past into another country's future, and whose children and grandchildren would serve the nation their elders had chosen.
That the community renamed itself yet kept its dead, its association, and its continuity says something essential about how immigrant America was built — not by erasing the old world, but by folding it, generation by generation, into the new. This is assimilation as it actually happened: slow, local, and written in stone.
If you visit
Six Mile Cemetery sits in the flat farming country outside Port Lavaca, and a visit rewards the kind of traveler who likes to read a place slowly. Walk the rows and let the surnames tell you where these families came from; the Czech and German spellings are a map of Central Europe transplanted to the Texas coast.
Look for the older graves, and remember that the earliest known burial here dates to the 1890s, when this was still the settlement of Marekville. Seek out the resting places of veterans, and consider that the wars they served in span nations and generations — a reminder that this quiet ground touches history far beyond its fence line.
This is a still, contemplative stop rather than a busy attraction, and it pairs naturally with the nearby community's other historic sites. Come with respect, keep to the paths, and you'll leave with a deeper feel for how ordinary immigrant families quietly became part of the American story.
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
- · Veranka Drgac
- · Anton Machacek
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Six Mile Presbyterian Church
Port Lavaca, TX
Worship in the Six Mile community began around 1894, when traveling ministers held monthly services in the local schoolhouse. Presbyterian services took root by 1909, and in 1911 the Rev. H. E. Beseda, Sr., formally organized a Czech Presbyterian church here. A 1923 building lost to a 1942 hurricane was quickly rebuilt, and services were held mostly in Czech until 1956, keeping the immigrants' mother tongue alive at the altar.
Six Mile-Royal Community
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In December 1894 the Phillips Investment Company deeded land here to Josef Marek and John Drgac, and the settlement—soon called Marekville—drew Czech and German farmers with a bumper first cotton crop. A school rose in 1895 and a post office named Royal opened in 1905, while the enduring "Six Mile" name recalled that it was six miles to water from Port Lavaca. Though the post office closed in 1910, the farming community kept growing for generations.
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Salem Lutheran Church
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