Tow Cemetery
Tow, Llano County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The 1850 death date of eight-year old Margaret R. Thorp, said to have died from a snakebite, documents the age of this burial ground in the community that formed around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks. An obelisk with an 1846 date is a memorial for a Morgan family member buried elsewhere. John F. Morgan, a successful fur hatmaker, arrived here in 1853, the same year William Tow and family settled Tow Valley. A long tradition of caring for this site by area families is now overseen by an association formed in the 1950s. This cemetery remains as a chronicle of the pioneers and generations that are the Tow area's heritage. Historic Texas Cemetery 2001
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The 1850 grave of eight-year-old Margaret Thorp, said to have died of a snakebite, marks the age of this burial ground in the community that grew around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks. A successful fur hatmaker arrived in 1853, the same year William Tow and his family settled Tow Valley, and generations of area families have tended the graves ever since. An association formed in the 1950s continues that long tradition of care.
Why it matters
Tied to a pioneer saltworks and the earliest settlers of Tow Valley, this cemetery chronicles the hardscrabble frontier settlement of the Texas Hill Country before the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Tow Valley in the 1840s and 1850s was true Texas frontier — a young republic newly become a state, its western hill country still being opened to settlement by families willing to risk everything for land. This was the era of westward expansion at its most elemental: no towns to speak of, few roads, and self-reliance as the price of survival. Salt, of all things, helped anchor a community here, for salt was a necessity for preserving meat and keeping livestock, and a saltworks could draw settlers the way water draws game.
The community that formed around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks was part of that first wave of pioneers pushing into the interior. Their world was one of hard labor, isolation, and real danger — from the land, from illness, and from the ordinary hazards of a place with no doctor close at hand.
This cemetery, with a grave dating to 1850, is a rare and precious record of just how early people were living, working, and dying in Tow Valley. It reaches back nearly to the beginning of Anglo settlement in this corner of the Hill Country.
People & events
The oldest sorrow recorded here belongs to a child. Eight-year-old Margaret R. Thorp died in 1850, said to have been killed by a snakebite — a stark reminder of how unforgiving frontier life could be, where a single afternoon's misfortune could take a young life. Her grave, dated 1850, is what tells us how old this burial ground truly is and how early the saltworks community had already put down roots.
The marker also notes an obelisk bearing an 1846 date, raised as a memorial to a member of the Morgan family who is actually buried elsewhere — a monument standing in for a grave that lies somewhere else. The Morgan name recurs here in the person of John F. Morgan, described as a successful fur hatmaker, who arrived in 1853. That he made his living from hats is a small, vivid detail of an economy built on what the land and its animals could provide.
Morgan came in the same year that William Tow and his family settled Tow Valley — the settlers who gave the place its very name. Together these people and dates sketch the founding generation of the community. The long tradition of caring for their graves was formalized in the 1950s, when an association was organized to oversee the site and carry that responsibility forward.
Its place in the American story
Tow Cemetery is a chronicle of frontier settlement written in headstones. The founding of Tow Valley, the arrival of its earliest families, the loss of a child, the memory of a fur hatmaker — these are the small, human building blocks of the westward expansion that, multiplied across a continent, became the American story. Places like this remind us that "the frontier" was not an abstraction but a collection of individual families making a go of it.
The saltworks at the community's origin points to a larger truth about how the West was settled: people gathered where a vital resource could be worked, and a settlement grew up around the labor. Salt, timber, water, ore — such practical necessities, not grand plans, often decided where American communities took hold.
And the generations-long tradition of tending these graves, culminating in a caretaking association in the 1950s, reflects a value found in countless small American communities: the determination to preserve the memory of the pioneers who came first. A cemetery cared for across more than a century is a community insisting that its origins still matter.
If you visit
Approach this old cemetery as the frontier record it is. Seek out the earliest dates — the 1850 grave of young Margaret Thorp and the 1846 date on the Morgan obelisk — and let those numbers sink in; they place you nearly at the very beginning of settlement in Tow Valley. Standing among the oldest stones, you are keeping company with the region's first pioneers.
Remember as you walk that this ground grew up around a saltworks, a detail that repays a little imagination. Picture the practical, hardworking community that once depended on that resource, the families who named the valley, and the hatmaker who set up his trade here in the 1850s. The place feels remote and quiet today, and that isolation is itself a window into how far these settlers were from the comforts of the settled East.
If you are exploring the Lake Buchanan and Llano County backcountry, this makes a contemplative stop well off the beaten path. It is a working example of a community caring for its own history — a burial ground still watched over by an association of local families — so tread gently and let the oldest graves tell you how deep the roots of Tow Valley really go.
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
- · William Tow
- · John F. Morgan
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Isaac Byler Maxwell
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Born in Tennessee in 1837 and orphaned of his mother as a boy, Isaac 'Ike' Maxwell followed the westering tide to the Texas Hill Country in 1854, naming his new home Bluffton after the Arkansas town he had left behind. He scouted for frontier units during the Civil War, then served his county as justice of the peace and in the state legislature, where he helped secure the granite that built the Texas Capitol. A Church of Christ minister, he was remembered at his death in 1931 as the oldest living pioneer of Llano County.
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