DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker says about Cypress Creek Cemetery, out there in Kerr County. Now, some cemeteries hold just names and dates. But every now and then, you pull off the road and find a piece of ground that holds whole stories — generations of them, pressed into the Hill Country soil like leaves in an old book.
Cypress Creek Cemetery is one of those places. The oldest documented grave belongs to Laura Steves Boerner, who died in 1861. Think about that for a moment.
The ground hadn't even finished settling over her when the world around her came apart. Her husband, Wilhelm Boerner, was killed at the Battle of Nueces — August of 1862. One family.
Two graves. A community trying to hold itself together through something terrible. And this wasn't a grand municipal cemetery, mind you.
This was a small cemetery on Sturdy Oak Farm. That's where they laid their neighbors, their children, and their pioneers. It's where two strangers came to rest as well — travelers passing through the area who died of tuberculosis along the way.
They never made it to wherever they were headed, but this community gave them a place in the earth all the same. There's a quiet dignity in that. Hand-cut stones mark the grave of Dr.
August Pfeiffer, the community's respected physician. Someone took time with those stones. Cut them by hand.
That kind of effort tells you something about how a community felt about a man. The marker calls this cemetery a link with the nineteenth-century heritage of the Cypress Creek community, and that's exactly right. A husband lost to battle.
A wife gone before him. Children. Settlers.
Strangers. A doctor the neighbors thought enough of to honor in stone. Sometimes the smallest patch of ground carries the heaviest history.
What the marker says
The oldest documented grave in this cemetery is that of Laura Steves Boerner (d. 1861), whose husband, Wilhelm Boerner, was killed at the Battle of Nueces in August 1862. Also interred in the small cemetery on Sturdy Oak Farm are children, pioneer settlers, and two strangers who died of tuberculosis while traveling through the area. Hand-cut stones mark the grave of the community's respected physician, Dr. August Pfeiffer. The cemetery provides a link with the 19th-century heritage of the Cypress Creek community. (1989)