Youngsport
Killeen, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In January 1846, Francis L. Mudd received one-third of a league of land in this area along the Lampasas River. Four years later, the property became part of the newly created Bell County, carved out of Milam County. The next year, Michael Young purchased a parcel of Mudd's land and settled here with his family, reportedly because they had stopped while traveling to care for a sick daughter who did not survive. They buried her in what would become known as Live Oak Cemetery. A ship captain before moving to this area, Young allegedly named the community Young's Port, because he had finally found his port. Other early landowners and settlers included Anderson Young and P.C. Mitchell. In 1871, eleven years before the city of Killeen was established, Youngsport's post office opened. At the turn of the 20th century, the settlement supported several businesses, including a general store, barbership, drugstore, physician's office and blacksmith. The Live Oak Baptist and Church of Christ congregations served area residents, and local children attended a schoolhouse that was moved to the community around 1886. For many years, Youngsport residents received products and services from Killeen. By 1930, when the post office closed, three men and one woman served the community as postmaster. Eight years later, the school, which accommodated grades one through eight, closed, and students transferred into the Killeen district. By 2005, three cemeteries and the Church of Christ served as links to the early years of the dispersed agricultural settlement. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Michael Young settled this stretch of the Lampasas River around 1851, reportedly having stopped to care for a sick daughter who died and was buried in what became Live Oak Cemetery. A former ship captain, he is said to have named the place Youngsport because he had finally found his port. The community gained a post office in 1871, supported stores, a blacksmith, and churches by 1900, but faded as nearby Killeen drew away its trade; by 2005 only cemeteries and a church remained.
Why it matters
Youngsport is a portrait of the countless small agricultural settlements that briefly flourished across frontier Texas before the railroad and larger neighboring towns absorbed their commerce.
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Related people
- · Michael Young
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Live Oak Cemetery
Killeen, TX
Live Oak Cemetery near Killeen traces its beginnings to about 1875, when the Young family, traveling west from Alabama, buried a daughter who died of sickness along the way — soon followed by her father, Michael Young. First formally deeded for burials in 1901, the ground grew to hundreds of graves and gave its story to the nearby community of Youngsport. It remains in use and cared for by a local cemetery association.
Sharp Cemetery and Rock Creek Baptist Church of Christ
Killeen, TX
This cemetery began as a family burial ground when the Sharp family, having moved to the Lampasas River country in 1859, laid their six-year-old daughter Sarah to rest here in 1864. In 1879 the widowed Emily Sharp deeded three acres to create a community cemetery, and neighboring families gave land for a church and school, leading to the founding of the Rock Creek Baptist Church of Christ in 1882. The oldest graves, some marked only with field stones and ringed by nineteenth-century rock fences, hold the settlers, war veterans, and lost children of a young Central Texas community.
McBryde Cemetery
Killeen vicinity, TX
When Mancel T. McBryde brought his family from Georgia to Bell County in the early 1860s, the Texas frontier was still a place where families made their own institutions—including where to lay their dead. Upon his wife Jane's death in 1885, he chose a rise south of the family home for her grave, beginning a burial ground that gathered McBryde and Hoover descendants, their graves facing east and the oldest ringed in stone. Kin still tend it today.
Cedar Knob Cemetery (HTC)
Salado, TX
The first settlers along the Lampasas River basin were veterans who took land grants after Texas independence and stockmen seeking grassland for their herds. This cemetery below Cedar Knob Mountain grew from an 1858 homestead burial and a donation of land by Silas Burks in the 1870s, gathering pioneers who arrived by wagon caravan from as far as Missouri. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers relocated it and nine other cemeteries here ahead of the Stillhouse dam, consolidating burials dating to the late 1840s.