Squaw Creek Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the mid-1850s, the road to California pulled families west from all over the country. The gold rush had made California a powerful lure, and overland migrants from Arkansas and other Southern states often crossed Texas on their way. The journey depended on water and grass for the animals. Without them, a wagon train could not go on.

The Texas Hill Country was then still at the edge of settlement. German immigrants had founded Fredericksburg in Gillespie County in the 1840s, and Anglo-American families were spreading into the surrounding creeks and valleys. Frontier life there meant isolation, hard work, and real dangers, and families relied heavily on their kin.

The 1860s brought the Civil War, which divided loyalties in the Hill Country more sharply than in much of Texas. In the decades that followed, small farm communities grew up around churches, schools, and family cemeteries. Burial grounds like this one were often the first and most lasting institutions in these communities.

One note on the name: "Squaw" was a common term in nineteenth-century place names, but it is now widely recognized as an offensive word for Native American women. It remains part of this cemetery's historical name as recorded on the marker.

👥People & events

Around 1856, Francis Marion Nixon and his wife, Catherine Elliot, set out from Arkansas for California. Like many overland travelers, they ran into a practical problem: their livestock needed water and forage. To find it, the family turned south from the North Texas plains and into this rugged country. It was a detour, not a destination, and it changed the course of their lives.

They first camped on a hill near the Mason–Gillespie county line, and the spot came to be called Nixon Point. In the 1860s they settled in this part of Gillespie County. Their son, Andrew Jackson Nixon, married Lurana Wooten, built a home nearby, and the couple raised fourteen children. That one household became the core of the Squaw Creek community.

The family tree kept branching. Marriages brought the Baethge, Ratto, Strackbein, Mund, Faught, and Gibson names into the extended Nixon line, a mix that reflects the blending of Anglo-American and German families in the Hill Country. In 1872, A.J. Nixon conveyed 110 acres to his brother-in-law, Henry Strackbein, and that land included the future cemetery. The first recorded burial was Elizabeth Gibson in 1873. A deed by Adolph Strackbein in 1914 is the cemetery's first legal mention. Today about sixty people rest here, most of them Nixon kin, including veterans of the Civil War and World War I.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Nixon story shows something easy to forget about westward expansion: many families never reached the place they set out for. A shortage of water, a tired herd, or a promising valley could turn a stop on the way into a home. Countless American communities were founded this way, by accident as much as by plan.

The cemetery also reflects a broader pattern in rural America, where a community was often one extended family. Kinship organized everything: who owned land, who married whom, and who was buried beside whom. A small graveyard holding mostly one family's descendants is a record of how frontier communities actually held together.

With veterans of both the Civil War and World War I buried here, this quiet plot connects a remote Hill Country settlement to the nation's defining conflicts. Over two generations, families who came west in wagons sent sons to wars that shaped the country, then brought them home to rest on family land.

🧭If you visit

This is a small rural family cemetery, so come with quiet respect. As you walk the rows, look for the recurring surnames named on the marker: Nixon, Strackbein, Gibson, and the others. You can almost trace the family tree in stone. Graves marked with military service are a reminder of the veterans buried here.

The setting is part of the story. Look out over the surrounding Hill Country and think about what a family with thirsty livestock would have needed to find: water, grass, and shelter. It becomes easier to see why the Nixons stayed.

The cemetery fits well into a scenic Hill Country drive through Gillespie County and toward the Mason County line, with Fredericksburg not far away for meals and more history. Rural cemeteries may sit near or on private land, so stay on public access routes, close any gates you open, and leave everything as you found it.