Brown Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is the story of Brown Cemetery, out in Kerr County. Now, sometime in the late 1840s, a man named Joshua D.

Brown packed up and traveled from Gonzales. He landed on a stretch of land along the water and set to work establishing a cypress shingle mill, right there on the site of what is now Kerrville. Joshua D.

Brown, born in 1816, was the kind of man who showed up and got to building. He put down roots, and so did the people around him. His wife, Sarah Jane, who was born a Goss, is buried here.

Her parents, the Reverend John Goss and Mary Goss, they're here too. Family, layered on family, going back into the ground of this place. The cemetery itself dates from 1872.

That's the year Brown's nephew, Thomas Goss, became the first to be buried here. And the story doesn't stop there. Not by a long stretch.

In 1923, something happened that quietly changed the character of this ground. Use of part of the Brown Cemetery was granted to the Woman's Auxiliary of a local American Legion post, for a veterans' burial ground. That ground came to be called Kerrville National Cemetery.

So what started as one family's final resting place grew into something the whole country lays claim to. Joshua D. Brown passed in 1876.

The cypress shingle mill is long gone. But this land, it's still doing its work.

What the marker says

During the late 1840s, Joshua D. Brown (1816-1876) traveled from Gonzales and established a cypress shingle mill on the site of what is now Kerrville. This cemetery dates from 1872, when Brown's nephew, Thomas Goss was buried here. The graves of Brown and his wife, Sarah Jane (Goss), and Sarah's parents, the Rev. John and Mary Goss, are also located here. In 1923, use of part of the Brown Cemetery was granted to the Woman's Auxiliary of a local American Legion post for a veterans' burial ground that came to be called Kerrville National Cemetery. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986