Lexington Memorial Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. You're rolling through Lee County, and out here the land holds memory the way good soil holds rain. This is the story of the Lexington Memorial Cemetery, and it starts, as so many Texas stories do, with people of faith planting roots in unfamiliar ground.

A Methodist Episcopal church was organized in Lexington in 1882. Folks around there knew it simply as the German Methodist Church, and that name tells you something about the congregation who gathered beneath its roof. These were families with German names, names you'd have to slow down to say right: Bauer, Grusendorf, Hillegeist, Hornung, Letterman, Otto, Peterson, Raesener, Raschke.

Charter members, every one of them. They built something together. Then, in November of 1898, the church did what communities do when they know they're staying.

They purchased two acres of land for a cemetery. A cemetery is a declaration, after all. It says: we are not passing through.

Come spring of 1899, the first recorded burials were made on that ground. And here is where the story asks you to sit quiet for a moment. Those first two souls laid to rest were children.

Two-year-old Reinhold Retzlaff. Four-year-old Gustav Hillegeist. The ground that was meant to hold generations received the smallest of them first.

That weight doesn't lift easy, and it shouldn't. Time kept moving, as it does. Among those eventually interred in this cemetery are Civil War veterans.

Jacob Seifert is here. Gustav Urbantke is here, a man who served as a lay minister for forty years. And then there is Bernhard Retzlaff, a man who carries one of the most complicated stories a soldier can carry.

He fought for both the Union and the Confederacy. Two sides of the bloodiest American conflict, and this one man stood on each. The marker doesn't try to explain it, and neither will I.

It simply tells you he is here, in this ground, among his people. That's what this cemetery is, when you get down to it. It's a place where complicated lives came to rest alongside small ones, where veterans and lay ministers and the children of charter members all share two acres of Lee County earth.

The German Methodist Church organized in 1882. The land was purchased in 1898. And the families who built that church are still there, in the most permanent way imaginable.

Some stories end with a flourish. This one just asks you to remember the names.

What the marker says

A Methodist Episcopal church, locally known as the German Methodist Church, was organized in Lexington in 1882. The church purchased two acres of land for a cemetery in November 1898. The first recorded burials on this site were those of two-year-old Reinhold Retzlaff and four-year-old Gustav Hillegeist in the spring of 1899. Also interred here are Civil War veterans Bernhard Retzlaff (who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy), Jacob Seifert, and Gustav Urbantke, who served as a lay minister for forty years. Others buried here include members of the Bauer, Grusendorf, Hillegeist, Hornung, Letterman, Otto, Peterson, Raesener, and Raschke families. All were charter members of the church. (1999)