Cook Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is Cook Cemetery, out in Lampasas County, and it holds a distinction that deserves a moment of quiet respect: it is the oldest cemetery in Lampasas. That's not a small thing.

Every town has a beginning, and sometimes the beginning is a graveyard. This one was established as a pioneer community graveyard in the mid-1850s, when this part of Texas was still being figured out by the people brave or stubborn enough to settle it. The first marked burial here was that of Rebecca Hughes, in 1854.

That name is worth saying slowly. Rebecca Hughes. Whoever she was, she was first.

Now, the cemetery carries the name Cook, and the Cooks were William M. and Cynthia Cook, Arkansas natives who made their way to Texas about 1856. They bought the land containing this very graveyard in 1861. So the cemetery existed before the Cooks arrived, and the Cooks arrived and put their name on it by putting their deed on it.

That's how history works sometimes. You show up, you stay, the land remembers you. The community buried its dead here through those hard pioneer decades, and then something happened in 1873.

Major flooding. The last recorded burial is that of J. S.

Brown, who died in 1873. After that, nothing. No recorded burials after J.

S. Brown. The marker says it is believed the flooding is why.

Believed. Not proven, not documented. Just the most reasonable explanation a community could offer for why a graveyard went quiet.

And it has stayed quiet, in that way. Time and development have done their own work on this place. Highway construction, business development.

The cemetery has been altered by both. But it survived, and in 1978 it was deeded to the Lampasas County Historical Commission. The oldest graveyard in Lampasas, holding a name, Rebecca Hughes, from 1854, tended now by people who understand that some things are worth keeping.

That's not nothing. That's everything.

What the marker says

This cemetery, Lampasas' oldest, was established as a pioneer community graveyard in the mid-1850s. The first marked burial here was that of Rebecca Hughes in 1854. The cemetery is named after Arkansas natives William M. and Cynthia Cook who moved to Texas about 1856 and bought the land containing this graveyard in 1861. No recorded burials occurred here after that of J. S. Brown (d. 1873), due, it is believed, to major flooding here in 1873. The cemetery has been altered by highway and business development. It was deeded to the Lampasas County Historical Commission in 1978.