Slave Burial Ground in Old Round Rock Cemetery
Round Rock, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Near the gravesite of outlaw Sam Bass, one-half acre of Old Round Rock Cemetery was set aside for slave burials. Enclosed by cedar posts and barbed wire, sites are marked head and foot with large limestone rocks. Some rocks are hand-grooved with names and dates. White graves here are dated as early as 1851. The first marked grave of a freed slave is dated 1880. Although there are 40 to 50 known burial sites of freedmen and the burial ground is still in use, no interments of former slaves occurred after the turn of the century.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In a corner of Old Round Rock Cemetery, near the grave of outlaw Sam Bass, half an acre was set aside for the burial of enslaved people and, later, freedmen. Enclosed by cedar posts and barbed wire, the graves are marked at head and foot with limestone rocks, some hand-grooved with names and dates. The earliest known grave of a freed slave dates to 1880, and although dozens of freedmen rest here, no former slaves were interred after the turn of the century.
Why it matters
Segregated in death as in life, burial grounds like this are among the few surviving physical records of enslaved and newly freed African Americans, preserving names that official histories rarely bothered to keep.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Round Rock grew up along Brushy Creek in central Texas in the mid-1800s, as settlers from the American South moved into the rich blackland prairie. Many of them brought enslaved people, and those enslaved workers cleared land, raised crops, and built much of the early community. The earliest white graves in Old Round Rock Cemetery date to 1851, when slavery was still legal in Texas.
The Civil War ended slavery. In Texas, freedom was announced at Galveston on June 19, 1865, the day now celebrated as Juneteenth. For the formerly enslaved people around Round Rock, the years after the war brought the hard work of building free lives: reuniting families, finding paid work, founding churches, and burying their dead with dignity.
Even so, segregation followed African Americans into the cemetery. A separate half acre was set aside for Black burials, which shows how deeply the color line ran through Texas life during slavery, Reconstruction, and after.
People & events
Most people buried in this half acre are not named in any history book. Their graves are marked the way many poor and rural families marked them: large limestone rocks at the head and foot. Some of those stones have names and dates cut into them by hand. Someone took the time and effort to make sure a loved one would be remembered.
The first marked grave of a freed person here dates to 1880. Between forty and fifty burials of freedmen are known, although burials of formerly enslaved people ended by the turn of the twentieth century, as that generation passed. The burial ground itself has stayed in use, so it links the people who lived through slavery with the families who came after them.
The cemetery is better known for a very different grave. The outlaw Sam Bass was mortally wounded in a gunfight in Round Rock in 1878 and is buried nearby. Visitors often come looking for him. This marker asks them to also notice the quieter graves close by, of people whose lives were never written up in newspapers or legends.
Its place in the American story
Enslaved people left very few written records of their own. They were usually listed in property documents without surnames, if they were listed at all. Burial grounds like this one are among the few physical traces of their lives and of the first generation of freedom that followed.
The hand-grooved names and dates on these stones matter because they are a record African Americans made for themselves. Families of freed people often used whatever they had to mark a grave, and that effort was a way of claiming full humanity after slavery had denied it.
Across the United States, many burial grounds of enslaved and free Black people have been paved over, plowed under, or forgotten. Texas has recognized this one with a historical marker, and that recognition is part of a wider national effort to find and protect these places and restore them to the story of American history.
If you visit
Old Round Rock Cemetery is in the older part of town, not far from the creek that gave Round Rock its name. Come quietly. This is a working cemetery and a sacred place for the families connected to it.
Look for the fieldstones set at the head and foot of each grave. They are easy to walk past if you are expecting carved monuments. Look closely, but do not touch or disturb them, and you may see names and dates scratched in by hand. The cedar posts and wire around the area mark the half acre that was set apart.
Most visitors come to find Sam Bass's grave. Take a few extra minutes for this section too. Round Rock is close to Austin and along the busy I-35 corridor, so it is an easy and meaningful stop on a central Texas trip, a chance to remember the people who helped build the town and whose names are recorded only on these stones.
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
Nearby & related markers
Round Rock Cemetery
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Established in the early 1850s, this burial ground holds more than 2,000 graves, its oldest legible stone marking eleven-year-old Angeline Scott in 1851. A half-acre served as a segregated burial ground for enslaved people and freedmen in the nineteenth century, and among the veterans and pioneers rests outlaw Sam Bass, who died here in 1878 two days after being shot by Texas Rangers. The cemetery's roll of doctors, ministers, and tradesmen reads like a directory of early Round Rock.
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