DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in McLennan County, there's a small family cemetery that holds a whole lot of history in a quiet patch of ground — and it all started, as so many things do, with a loss that no family should have to bear. The year was 1853, and county judge John Allen Cobbs and his wife Eleanor buried their infant daughter, Missouri V.
Cobbs, in that earth. That grave was the beginning of what would become the Cobbs-Walker Cemetery. You think about that — a place that would go on to hold generations of family, two veterans of the Texas War for Independence, and the unmarked graves of former slaves, all of it starting with one tiny life that barely had the chance to begin.
The cemetery has two sections. One holds twenty-one graves of the Cobbs family and their related kin. The other holds several unmarked graves of people who were once held as slaves.
Those unmarked stones — or the absence of stones — carry a weight all their own. They are part of this ground, part of this story, even if history didn't see fit to record their names the way it did others. Now, among the Cobbs' daughter Rebecca's family, there are two names that reach back to the founding of Texas itself.
William Collett Walker, born in 1818 and laid to rest in 1896, was Rebecca's husband — and he was a veteran of the Texas War for Independence. And then there's his father, James F. Walker, Jr., born in 1793 and gone by 1873, who served at the Battle of San Jacinto.
San Jacinto. The battle that changed everything for this land. And here he rests, in a modest family cemetery in McLennan County, alongside an infant girl whose short life started it all back in 1853.
That's Texas, right there — the grand sweep of history sharing the same quiet ground with the most private kind of grief.
What the marker says
This small family cemetery was begun in 1853 upon the death of Missouri V. Cobbs, infant daughter of county judge John Allen Cobbs and his wife Eleanor. The graveyard contains one section with twenty-one graves of the Cobbs and related families, and another section with several unmarked graves of former slaves. Also interred here are two veterans of the Texas War for Independence, William Collett Walker (1818-1896), husband of the Cobbs' daughter, Rebecca; and his father, James F. Walker, Jr. (1793-1873), who served at the Battle of San Jacinto. (1988)