DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out in Bastrop County, there's a place called Grassyville — or rather, there was a place called Grassyville. The village itself has long since disappeared, the way so many small Texas communities do, quietly slipping back into the land.
But the cemetery is still there. Still tended. Still telling the story of the people who came and stayed.
German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s. They organized a Methodist church. They put down roots deep enough that even after the village was gone, something of them remained.
Walk through that graveyard today and you'll notice something that sets it apart — many of the gravestones are lettered in German script. That right there is a kind of stubbornness, the quiet kind, where a people hold onto who they are even in death, even in a new land, even in Texas. The two earliest burials on record belong to Auguste D.
Hamff and Bertha Kunkel, both dated 1871. Two names. Two stones.
The beginning of something that would grow to one hundred and thirty graves across a acre and a half of ground. Somewhere in that cemetery, seven Confederate veterans are buried — men who served in Creuzbaur's-Welhausen's battery during the Civil War, eighteen sixty-one to eighteen sixty-five. Seven of them made it back to Grassyville.
That's what the marker tells us, and it's worth sitting with. The Grassyville Cemetery Association was established in 1963, and it is that association keeping watch over those one hundred and thirty graves to this day. The village is gone.
The association remains. The stones remain. Some things, it turns out, outlast the towns that built them.
What the marker says
German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s and organized a Methodist church. Many gravestones in this cemetery are lettered in German script. The two earliest burials, Auguste D. Hamff and Bertha Kunkel, are both dated 1871. Seven Confederate veterans who served in Creuzbaur's-Welhausen's battery during the Civil War (1861-1865) are buried in the 1.5-acre graveyard. Although the village has disappeared, the burial ground continues in use. There are 130 graves tended by Grassyville Cemetery Association, which was established in 1963. (1977)