Terry Cemetery
San Saba, San Saba County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Terry Cemetery exists as a reminder of the first pioneers to arrive in this area. In 1859, Stephen Woodson Terry (1828-1913) and wife Volumnia Jane (Adams) (1830-1901), granddaughter of Revolutionary War Soldier Brittain Adams, moved their family to Texas from Tennessee. The cemetery has served as a resting place for Terry descendants and family friends since 1880. The first burial is that of Pocahontas Terry (1869-1880), the ten-year-old daughter of Volumnia and Stephen. Stephen served the community as a member of the frontier organization and as the tenth Sheriff of San Saba County. Notable burials include Lloyd Warden Terry who served as County Judge and County Attorney for 27 years.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1859, Stephen Woodson Terry and his wife Volumnia Jane moved their family from Tennessee to this part of San Saba County, joining the first wave of pioneers to the area. The family cemetery has held Terry descendants and friends since 1880, when their ten-year-old daughter Pocahontas became its first burial. Stephen served the frontier community as its tenth county sheriff, and later kin like Judge Lloyd Warden Terry carried the family's public service forward.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the memory of a founding frontier family whose members helped organize law and governance in a newly settled Texas county.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time the Terry family arrived in 1859, this stretch of central Texas was very much a frontier. San Saba County itself had only been organized a few years earlier, and the line of Anglo settlement was still pressing westward into land where isolated homesteads sat far from any courthouse, church, or neighbor. Families who came here were choosing a hard, self-reliant life along the rivers and creeks that watered the rolling hill country.
The wider nation in these years was expanding fast and uneasily. The generation that settled this county carried the memory of the American Revolution within living reach of their grandparents, and they were building new communities on the far edge of a young republic that had only recently become a state. Roads were few, distances were long, and the rhythms of life followed the seasons and the safety of the land.
This was also a country where danger was a daily calculation. The Texas frontier of the mid-nineteenth century saw recurring raids and conflict as settlers pushed into contested ground, and men were often called upon to organize for the common defense of scattered households. A family cemetery like this one grew directly out of that reality: when the nearest town was a day's ride away, you buried your dead close to home, on land you had cleared with your own hands.
People & events
The story here begins with a young couple's decision to gamble on a new country. Stephen Woodson Terry and his wife, Volumnia Jane, packed up their family in Tennessee and made the long overland journey to Texas, arriving in this part of San Saba County among its earliest settlers. Volumnia carried her own thread of American history with her — she was the granddaughter of a soldier who had served in the Revolution, a living link between the founding of the nation and its westward frontier.
The cemetery's first grave is also its most heartbreaking. In 1880 the Terrys laid to rest their ten-year-old daughter, Pocahontas, and in doing so consecrated the ground that would hold their family for generations to come. It is a reminder that the frontier took its heaviest toll on the young, and that a family plot often began not with an elder but with a child.
Stephen did not remain a private settler for long. He took on the work of building a community where little formal government yet existed, serving in a frontier defense organization and later stepping into public office as one of the early sheriffs of the county he had helped settle. That instinct for public service outlasted him. A later member of the family, Lloyd Warden Terry, gave decades to the county as its judge and attorney, carrying the Terry name from the raw work of settlement into the steadier work of law and governance.
Its place in the American story
A small family cemetery on a Texas hillside might seem far removed from the great national story, but it is in fact one of its truest expressions. The westward movement of the nineteenth century was not carried out by armies or governments so much as by thousands of ordinary families who loaded wagons, said goodbye to older states, and staked their futures on unbroken land. The Terrys are one of those families, and this ground records the price and the promise of that migration.
Their story also captures how American self-government took root at the very edge of settlement. Before there were reliable courts and lawmen, communities depended on their own residents to organize defense and keep order — and then, as counties matured, those same families helped build the institutions that replaced improvised frontier arrangements. A settler who becomes a sheriff, and a descendant who becomes a judge, trace in miniature the whole arc from frontier to established society.
And in Volumnia's Revolutionary ancestry there is a quiet continuity that ran through countless pioneer families: the grandchildren of the Revolution carrying the young republic's idea of a self-made citizen onto ever more distant frontiers. This cemetery holds not just individual lives but that inheritance, passed down and planted in Texas soil.
If you visit
Come to a place like this expecting quiet. A pioneer family cemetery is a small, intimate landscape — weathered stones gathered together on open ground, framed by the wide sky and rolling country that first drew settlers here. Give yourself time to walk the rows slowly and read the dates; the arithmetic of a frontier life becomes very real when you stand before it.
Look first for the earliest markers, and remember that the story of this ground begins with a child. From there you can trace the family across the decades, watching the same surname reappear generation after generation — a record, in stone, of a household that stayed and put down roots rather than moving on.
Set within the broader hill country of central Texas, a stop like this rewards the traveler who likes back roads over interstates. It pairs naturally with a slow drive through San Saba County's small towns and river crossings, where the scale of the land itself explains why the people buried here had to be so resourceful. Stand a moment, and you can feel how far from everything this once was.
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
- · Stephen Woodson Terry
- · Volumnia Jane Terry
Themes & tags
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