Type Cemetery
Coupland, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The earliest Anglo settlers of this area came to the vicinity in the 1840s. They called their community Post Oak Island for an isolated oak grove between Bastrop and Circleville. Many of these pioneers had moved on by the time Swedish and Danish immigrants arrived in the 1890s. Swedish-born August Smith owned a store which straddled the line between Bastrop and Williamson counties. Smith opened the Type Post Office in that store in 1902, probably naming the community for the printing machine owned by his friend Jonas Sunvision. The Type Cemetery was established on land conveyed by Peder and Christine Nygaard when the Swedish Free Mission Church was founded in May 1908. The tombstones of Anna Amalia Hansen (Hanson) (d. 1910) and Christina Fredrickson (d. 1915) are inscribed in Swedish, merely one indication of the strong cultural identification of the early settlers with their homelands. Burials before 1950 are primarily those of members of the Carlson, Hanson, Nygaard, Nyman, and Swenson families. The small number of Scandinavian burials in the cemetery after 1950 reflects the group's assimilation into American culture and the dispersal of local young people to cities. In 1954 the Swedish Free Mission Church merged with Kimbro's Free Church. Of the 36 graves counted in 1998, eleven were those of Swedish immigrants and fifteen were first or second generation Scandinavian Texans. Several Mexican graves were located on the eastern edge of the cemetery. The Yegua Creek Evangelical Free Church, which relocated to this site in 1987, maintains the Type Cemetery. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When Swedish and Danish immigrants settled the old Post Oak Island vicinity in the 1890s, they brought their language and faith with them; storekeeper August Smith opened the Type post office in 1902, and the Type Cemetery followed when the Swedish Free Mission Church was founded in 1908. Tombstones inscribed in Swedish testify to the settlers' strong ties to their homeland. Later generations assimilated and scattered to the cities, thinning the Scandinavian burials after 1950.
Why it matters
Type Cemetery preserves the imprint of Scandinavian immigration on rural Texas and the familiar arc from tight ethnic community to assimilation across a few generations.
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Related people
- · August Smith
- · Peder Nygaard
- · Christine Nygaard
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mager Cemetery
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Reinhold Mager, born in Brandenburg, Germany, married Franziska Krueger of the nearby Dessau community and donated an acre of their Williamson County farmland for a cemetery and school. The first known burial came in 1900, and many of the tombstones bear German inscriptions, fourteen of them marking the graves of infants. Burials ceased in 1951 with Franziska's own interment.
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