Steen Cemetery
Gonzales, Gonzales County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Steen family's migration west spanned several generations and included a friendship with the Davy Crockett family in Tennessee before they finally settled in Gonzales County in 1846. John Rumley Steen (1824-1910) bought this land, later known as Steen Flat, in 1849. In 1850, he married Mahala Burkett (1830-1881), whose family came from Missouri to Texas in 1830 as part of DeWitt's Colony. When their son, James P. Steen (1851-1863), fell ill and died, they honored his request to be buried under the trees that still shade this site. This cemetery remains as a chronicle of the pioneers and families who settled and developed this area. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2000
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Steen family's long push west carried them from a Tennessee friendship with the Crockett family to the Texas frontier, where John Rumley Steen bought this land in 1849 on ground that came to be called Steen Flat. He married Mahala Burkett, whose people had reached Texas in 1830 with DeWitt's Colony, and when their young son James died in 1863 the family honored his wish to rest beneath the shading trees that still stand here.
Why it matters
This family burial ground preserves the intimate human story behind the great westward migration that peopled Texas, from empresario colonies to the homesteads that followed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Steens put down roots here in 1846, Gonzales County was still raw frontier country in a Texas that had only just traded independence for statehood. This corner of south-central Texas sat at the edge of settled land, a place of open prairie and creek-bottom timber where families staked their futures on soil they could clear and plant themselves.
The timing matters. Texas had won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and joined the United States in 1845, and land here was suddenly cheap, plentiful, and open to anyone willing to work it. John Rumley Steen bought this ground in 1849, at the very front edge of the wave of American families pushing west into the new state.
Within little more than a decade, that hopeful frontier would be swept into the Civil War. The years the marker spans — from the days of the young republic to the war years of the 1860s — were among the most turbulent in the nation's history, and this quiet cemetery holds the memory of a family who lived through all of it on the land they had chosen.
People & events
The Steens were westering people long before Texas. Their migration stretched across several generations and several states, and somewhere along that road, in Tennessee, they counted the family of Davy Crockett among their friends — a small human detail that places them squarely in the great restless movement of Americans always looking toward the next horizon.
John Rumley Steen, born in 1824, was the one who finally stopped moving. He bought this land in 1849, and it took his name: Steen Flat. In 1850 he married Mahala Burkett, whose own family had come to Texas from Missouri two decades earlier, in 1830, as part of DeWitt's Colony — one of the empresario grants that first brought organized American settlement to this region.
The cemetery itself begins with heartbreak. Their son James, born in 1851, fell ill and died in 1863, still a boy of twelve. He asked to be buried beneath the trees on the family land, and his parents honored that wish. The shade he loved still falls across this spot. Mahala followed in 1881, John in 1910, their long lives bracketing the settling of a county.
Its place in the American story
Behind the grand phrase "westward expansion" are thousands of families exactly like this one — people who packed up in Tennessee or Missouri and moved, and moved again, until they found ground worth staying on. The Steens are that story in miniature, from a frontier friendship with the Crockett family to a homestead that outlasted three generations.
Mahala's connection to DeWitt's Colony ties this family to the very machinery of how Texas was peopled. The empresario system, in which agents recruited settlers to colonize land grants, brought the first organized American communities into the region years before independence. Her family was part of that founding generation; her husband was part of the statehood-era wave that followed. Together they span the whole arc.
And the little cemetery does something the history books rarely manage: it makes the migration personal. A boy who asked to rest under familiar trees, a marriage that joined two long westward journeys, parents who buried a child and kept farming — this is what the peopling of a continent actually felt like, one family and one grave at a time.
If you visit
Come for the trees first. The whole reason this cemetery exists is a boy's wish to lie beneath their shade, and those same trees still stand watch over the ground. Stand under them and you are standing in the exact spot that a grieving family chose more than a century and a half ago.
This is a quiet, rural resting place, not a monument — the kind of stop that rewards slowing down. Read the dates on the stones and let the arithmetic do its work: births in the 1820s and 1830s, a child's death in the war years, lives that reach into the twentieth century. Each span is a chapter of the frontier written in a single lifetime.
If you're threading through Gonzales County, this pairs naturally with the county's other early-settlement sites — it's a place that puts a human face on the DeWitt's Colony history you'll find referenced across the region. Give it a few unhurried minutes. Places this personal don't announce themselves; they reward the traveler who stops anyway.
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
- · John Rumley Steen
- · Mahala Burkett Steen
- · James P. Steen
Related events
- · DeWitt's Colony
Themes & tags
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