DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do my best to give it its due. Now, most cemetery stories start with something dignified — a founding father, a grand deed, a solemn ceremony. This one starts with a skunk.
Winter of 1859. A twenty-three-year-old man named John Davis joins a community wagon train headed for the pine forests of Bastrop County. Good work waiting, cold night ahead, and somewhere out in the dark — a skunk.
The skunk does what skunks do. And John Davis, sprayed and panicked, goes tearing wildly through the camp in the middle of the night. Now put yourself in that camp for just a moment.
Dead of winter. Comanche country. Something comes crashing through the darkness.
The men in that wagon train made a decision in a heartbeat, and it was the wrong one. John Davis was mistaken for a Comanche intruder and accidentally shot to death. His father, Jenkins Davis, brought his boy home.
He purchased 2.3 acres near Boggy Creek, not far from his own home in Manchaca, and buried John there. That 1859 burial is the earliest recorded on the grounds. Jenkins Davis held onto that grief and that land for seventeen years.
Then, in 1876, he made a decision that turned a private sorrow into something the whole community could share. Jenkins was a member of Onion Creek Masonic Lodge No. 220, one of the early lodges in the area, and he donated those same 2.3 acres to the lodge. The site became a community graveyard.
It was called Boggy Creek first, then Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery, and by the 1960s folks had taken to callin' it simply Masonic Cemetery. The land has grown over the years — from those original 2.3 acres to more than 6.6 acres now — and more than twelve hundred souls are buried there. Among them: pioneer settlers of the area and their descendants.
Members of fraternal orders — the Masons, the Woodmen of the World. And veterans. Veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Korean Conflict.
Generations of people who built and defended this part of Texas, all resting on land that a grieving father bought beside a creek because he needed somewhere to lay his boy down. Onion Creek Lodge No. 220 tends that ground to this day. A skunk, a dark night, a terrible mistake — and somehow, out of all of that, a place where more than twelve hundred people found their rest.
Jenkins Davis couldn't have known it then, but what he did with his grief turned out to be one of the most lasting things anyone in that county ever did.
What the marker says
According to local tradition, in the winter of 1859, 23-year-old John Davis joined a community wagon train headed for work in the pine forests of Bastrop County. Davis, sprayed by a skunk during the night, began running wildly through the camp. He was mistaken for a Comanche intruder and accidentally shot to death. His father, Jenkins Davis, buried his son here, on 2.3 acres he purchased near Boggy Creek and his Manchaca home. John's 1859 burial is the earliest recorded here. In 1876 Jenkins Davis, a member of the early area Onion Creek Masonic Lodge No. 220, donated the 2.3 acres to the lodge, and the site became a community graveyard. First called Boggy Creek and later Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery, the graveyard had become known simply as Masonic Cemetery by the 1960s. Enlarged over the years, the cemetery contains about 6.6 acres and more than 1,200 burials. Among the people buried here are area pioneer settlers and their descendants; members of fraternal organizations such as the Masons and Woodmen of the World; and veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I & II, and the Korean Conflict. Onion Creek Lodge No. 220, A. F. & A. M., continues to maintain the cemetery. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995