Smithwick Cemetery
Marble Falls vicinity, Burnet County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The history of this community cemetery dates to 1854 when 18-year-old Rebecca Chambers died and was buried here. Rebecca, who reportedly was ill while traveling past here with the family of her sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and E. G. Evans, asked to be buried on this flower-covered hillside. While the land was vacant public domain several other burials took place. There are about 65 early graves marked only by rocks. The cemetery site became part of the 160-acre survey of A. J. Stanford and was patented in 1857. The burial grounds were used by early settlers of Hickory Creek, Elm Grove, and Smithwick's Mill. The Smithwick Cemetery Association was formed in 1930. Additional land was added to the site over the years, a caretaker was hired, and improvements were made to the site, including a tabernacle and fencing. The association continues to maintain the site. Among the 600 burials here are 5 unknown graves reinterred from the South San Gabriel River area in 1974 by the U. S. Corps of Engineers, and veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. (1997) Incise on back: Researched by: Doris M. Henry
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Smithwick Cemetery began with a single wish: in 1854, eighteen-year-old Rebecca Chambers, gravely ill while traveling through, asked to be buried on this flowered hillside. Over the following decades the site grew into the shared burial ground of the Hickory Creek, Elm Grove, and Smithwick's Mill communities, its roughly 65 earliest graves marked only by stones. Today some 600 burials rest here, including veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea.
Why it matters
A community cemetery like this is a layered record of frontier settlement, its rows of graves tracing generations of ordinary Texans and the wars they answered.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s the hills of what is now Burnet County were frontier country, settled by families making the long, uncertain journey into central Texas in search of land. Travel was slow and hard, sickness was common, and death often came far from any established churchyard. Where a person died, there they were frequently laid to rest.
That reality is the origin of this hillside cemetery. Before the surrounding land was even claimed under a formal survey, it was open public domain — and it was here, on a flower-covered slope, that the community's first burials took place. A grave marked the land before a deed did.
As families put down roots in the nearby settlements, this quiet rise became their shared ground for mourning and remembrance, a fixed point in a landscape that was otherwise still being mapped, fenced, and claimed.
People & events
The cemetery's history begins in 1854 with a single wish. Rebecca Chambers, just eighteen years old, was reportedly ill while traveling through this country with her sister Nancy and brother-in-law E. G. Evans. Asked where she wished to rest, she chose this flower-covered hillside — and there she was buried when she died.
Her grave was not the last. While the land still lay vacant public domain, other burials followed, until roughly sixty-five of the earliest graves dotted the slope, marked only by rough stones. In 1857 the ground became part of a 160-acre survey patented to A. J. Stanford, but the hillside kept its role: it served as the burial place for the early settlers of the surrounding communities, including the mill settlement that gave the cemetery its name.
Generations of care followed. A cemetery association formed in 1930, added land over the years, hired a caretaker, and built up the site with fencing and a tabernacle. That same association still tends the grounds — a chain of stewardship running unbroken from a teenager's dying request to the present day.
Its place in the American story
A community cemetery is a history book written in stone, and this one records the American frontier experience with unusual clarity. Its layers — the earliest graves marked only by rocks, the later burials, the reinterment of five unknown souls moved from a river bottom during a federal water project — trace how a raw frontier gradually became a settled and organized community.
The roster of veterans buried here does the same on a national scale. Among the roughly six hundred graves rest men who answered the call in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. In a single hillside you can read the arc of American conflict across more than a century, told through the ordinary citizens of one rural place who served in each.
That is the quiet power of such a cemetery. It is not the resting place of the famous but of the many — the farmers, the mill families, the soldiers — whose collective lives are the real substance of the country's past.
If you visit
Walk gently here, and read the ground itself. The oldest section, where the earliest graves are marked only by plain stones, is the most eloquent part of the cemetery — each rough marker standing for a life recorded in no other way. These are the frontier's first residents, and their stones are their whole memorial.
Move outward from that core and you move forward in time, past the graves of settlers and the markers of veterans from war after war. The site's tabernacle and fencing are themselves part of the story, the work of an association that has cared for this place since 1930.
Set on a hillside outside Marble Falls, this is a spot for reflection more than sightseeing. Give yourself time to stand quietly, think of the young woman whose wish began it all, and consider how many ordinary lives are gathered on one slope. It is the kind of place that rewards stillness.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Rebecca Chambers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Henry Thomas Lodge, A.F. & A.M.
Marble Falls, TX
This Hill Country settlement grew up around the water mill Noah Smithwick built in 1855; when he left for California in 1861 the mill kept running. A. M. Cox raised this two-story building in 1874, a store below and, from 1876, a Masonic lodge above—the Henry Thomas Lodge, which minister Henry Thomas had relocated from nearby Turkey Bend. The lodge gained the upper floor through Cox's will, a small monument to frontier fraternal life.
Rockvale
Spicewood, TX
Rockvale grew from a pioneer settlement of the 1850s, where an 1855 log cabin doubled as school and church and a Baptist congregation organized in 1856. Thomas Lloyd Denniston deeded more than 36 acres to the Methodist church in 1872 for a stone sanctuary and a cemetery whose earliest recorded burial dates to 1870. That still-used cemetery is now among the few remnants of the vanished community.
Haynie Flat Cemetery
Spicewood, TX
The sparsely settled Haynie Flat community grew up near Red Bluff Creek and the Colorado River along the Burnet-Travis county line. Its cemetery's earliest graves belong to siblings Sallie and Dennis Cox, who died months apart in 1864, though the area is generally reckoned as settled in 1879 when the adjacent Haynie Flat School opened. Land records trace the community's slow formalization over decades, and after the school consolidated with Spicewood in 1950 and residential development arrived in the 1980s, the cemetery remained one of the few reminders that a community had ever stood here.
Site of Mormon Settlement
Marble Falls, TX
In 1851 some twenty Mormon families led by Lyman Wight settled here on the Texas frontier, building homes, lumber mills, and furniture shops. Wight, a former lieutenant of Joseph Smith who broke with Brigham Young's church, led his followers through a series of short-lived Texas colonies, and this one lasted only until 1853. The state marked the vanished settlement in 1936.