Halamicek Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Fayette County, a cemetery has a way of marking not just the dead, but the living, and the world they carried with them. This one starts, as these stories so often do, with a loss.

In 1899, Frank and Josephine Pustejovsky lost their infant daughter, Klara. They laid her to rest on land owned by relatives Peter and Rosina Krystinek. Peter, born in 1857.

Rosina, born in 1859. Their land, and their grief, shared. Later that same year, the Krystineks conveyed one acre around little Klara's grave, passing it along to John M.

Halamicek, Joseph Pokorney, and Frank Pustejovsky, among others, for use as a cemetery. One acre. For a growing community.

A community with a name worth pausing on: Roznov. Now, John and Anna Halamicek had come to this corner of Fayette County back in 1885. John, born 1855.

Anna, born 1865. And when they settled here, they gave the place a name straight from memory, straight from the old country. They named their settlement after John's birthplace in Czechoslovakia.

So the name Roznov didn't just describe a place on a Texas map. It described something a person carried a long way. And when you walk through the Halamicek Cemetery today, what you find, in the names carved into the stone, are the friends and family members of people who invested everything they had in this ground.

The marker says it plainly: their investment in this area is reflected in the names remembered here. Klara Pustejovsky was the first. She wouldn't be the last.

And in that one acre, a whole community found a place to remember who they were and where they came from.

What the marker says

When their infant daughter, Klara, died in 1899, Frank and Josephine Pustejovsky laid her to rest on this land owned by relatives Peter (1857-1927) and Rosina (1859-1919) Krystinek. Later that year, the Krystineks conveyed one acre around her grave to John M. Halamicek, Joseph Pokorney and Frank Pustejovsky, among others, for use as a cemetery for the growing community of Roznov. John (1855-1941) and Anna (1865-1939) Halamicek came here in 1885, naming their settlement after John's birthplace in Czechoslovakia. Their investment in this area is reflected in the names of friends and family members remembered here. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2001