Hochheim Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Hochheim Cemetery has to say, and friends, it's worth a few quiet minutes of your time. Now, every piece of ground tells a story if you know how to listen, and this particular stretch of DeWitt County earth has been doing the telling for more than a hundred years. It starts, as so many good Texas stories do, with a woman of uncommon generosity.

Rachel S. Crawford, born in 1806, donated the land that became the Hochheim Cemetery. That's the foundation of everything here.

She and her husband James, born in 1800, were pioneer settlers in the Hochheim community, and when their time came, they were laid to rest on the very ground Rachel had given. Many of their descendants followed, generation after generation, finding their way back to this same soil. Now here's where the story opens up into something bigger.

See, not far from Hochheim sat the port of Indianola, and through that port came wave after wave of pioneer immigrants making their way into Texas. Some of them didn't make it much farther. They rest here too, in unmarked sites, their names unrecorded, their journeys cut short before anyone thought to write them down.

That silence over those graves carries its own kind of weight. And then there are the veterans. Men who answered calls to arms in the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II.

Four conflicts, spread across generations, and the men who came home to this community, or didn't come home at all in the fullest sense, are honored here in this ground. Rachel Crawford passed in 1879, James had gone before her in 1861, and what she set in motion with that donation kept going long after both of them were gone. A cemetery in use for more than a hundred years isn't just a burial ground.

It's a community's whole long memory, pressed into the earth. That's what's waiting for you in Hochheim.

What the marker says

Land for the Hochheim Cemetery was donated by Rachel S. Crawford (1806-1879). She and her husband, James (1800-1861), were pioneer settlers in the Hochheim community. They and many of their descendants are buried here. The graveyard contains many unmarked sites where pioneer immigrants who entered Texas through the nearby port of Indianola were interred. Also buried here are veterans of the Civil War, Spanish American War, and World Wars I and II. In use for more than 100 years, the Hochheim Cemetery is an important element in the community's heritage.