Live Oak Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, I'm following the official marker on Live Oak Cemetery out of Travis County. Now settle in, because some stories start with land, and some start with loss, and this one starts with both. The original four-acre section of this cemetery included land donated by two men: James M.

Turley, born in 1816 and gone by 1883, and Andrew Jackson Hammett, born in 1829 and living on until 1907. Two men who gave ground so a community would have a place to remember its own. And the oldest grave in that ground belongs to Turley's own daughter, Tennessee Belle Hart, and her baby.

They died on August the twenty-seventh, 1874. You want to talk about a hard beginning, well, there it is. Right at the root of the place.

That same year, 1874, the community raised a church near the burial ground, and by 1877 that church building was also housing a school, which it continued to do until about 1886. One building carrying the weight of faith and learning both, out there where the land was still being figured out. And every summer, the pioneers in this area gathered for a ten-day camp meeting held under an adjacent brush arbor.

Ten days. Not a weekend revival, not a Sunday service. Ten full days, neighbors coming together under a roof of branches and open sky.

The cemetery grew quiet between those gatherings, the way cemeteries do. Then in 1948, a man named Herman Heep gave an additional eleven point oh six acres, and just like that, Live Oak had room again. Room it needed.

Today the site contains about sixteen hundred graves. Sixteen hundred souls who found their way to four acres that two men donated, on ground that first received a young woman and her baby on a late August day in 1874. That is the kind of beginning a place does not forget.

What the marker says

The original four-acre section of this cemetry included land donated by James M. Turley (1816-83) and Andrew Jackson Hammett (1829-1907). The oldest grave is that of Turley's daughter, Tennessee Belle Hart, and her baby, who died on Aug. 27, 1874. A community church, erected near the burial ground in 1874, also housed a school from 1877 to about 1886. Pioneers in this area gathered each summer for a 10-day long camp meeting held under an adjacent brush arbor. Live Oak Cemetery was enlarged in 1948, when Herman Heep gave an additional 11.06 acres. The site contains about 1600 graves. (1976)