Live Oak Cemetery

Duane's take

Now, what I'm about to tell you comes straight from the official marker at Live Oak Cemetery — this is my telling of what that stone has to say. There's a piece of land in Bell County that holds more than headstones. It holds a question — and depending on who you ask, the answer changes.

The official inventory of marked gravesites will tell you the first person buried at Live Oak Cemetery was a man named Michael Young. Eighteen seventy-five, it says. There it is, in the record.

Case closed. Except local tradition has a different story. That tradition holds that before Michael Young was laid to rest, before any of the paperwork, before the land had even passed out of state hands — his daughter was already there.

She is believed to have died of sickness near this very location, during the family's westward journey from Alabama. And she was buried here, the story goes, before her own father. Now, the marker doesn't give her a name.

It doesn't give her a date. Just that she was Young's daughter, that she took ill somewhere along that long road west, and that this patch of Bell County ground became her resting place. That's all tradition preserved.

Sometimes that's all tradition gets to keep. The land itself, at the time of Michael Young's interment in 1875, was still state public land. Nobody owned it in any legal sense.

It would stay that way for more than a decade, until 1886, when it passed into the private ownership of a man named John O. Rhea. But even then, the cemetery had no formal legal standing — not yet.

That wouldn't come until 1901, when a subsequent owner, P.C. Mitchell, signed a deed transferring three point nine acres of that land for cemetery purposes to cemetery trustees. That deed, right there, is the first legal documentation Live Oak Cemetery ever had.

And by the time Mitchell put pen to paper, about forty people were already buried within those acres. Forty burials. No deed.

No legal ownership for the first quarter-century of its existence. Just a community burying its dead in the only place that made sense. The tombstone dates back that up.

They suggest continuous use going all the way to 1875 — that very year Michael Young, and perhaps his daughter before him, first consecrated this ground. By 1990, the count had grown to around four hundred and thirty-five graves, marked and unmarked both. And the community those graves belong to?

It's called Youngsport. Reportedly named, the marker says, for Michael Young himself — the man whose burial the records acknowledge first, though tradition quietly insists he wasn't actually first at all. Today, Live Oak Cemetery still serves the Youngsport community, right alongside the Boone-Hamlin Cemetery.

A local cemetery association keeps the grounds. The work continues. So here's where you land with a place like this: the record says one thing, tradition says another, and somewhere between those two accounts is a little girl who traveled west from Alabama and never made it any further than Bell County, Texas.

The marker doesn't resolve that tension. It just holds it — the way good ground tends to do.

What the marker says

Although an inventory of marked gravesites indicates that the first person buried here was Michael Young, local tradition claims that distinction actually belongs to Young's daughter. She is believed to have died of sickness near this location during the family's westward journey from Alabama and buried here prior to her father's interment in 1875. At that time, this particular piece of land was still state public land. It was not until 1886 that it passed into the private ownership of John O. Rhea. The first legal documentation of Live Oak Cemetery is contained in a deed transfering 3.9 acres of land for cemetery purposes from a subsequent owner, P.C. Mitchell, to cemetery trustees in 1901. At that time the cemetery contained about 40 burials. The dates appearing on tombstones suggest that this cemetery has been in continuous use since 1875. By 1990 it contained about 435 marked and unmarked graves. This cemetery is closely associated with the community of Youngsport, reportedly named for Michael Young. Live Oak Cemetery, together with the Boone-Hamlin Cemetery, continues to actively serve the Youngsport community and is maintained by a local cemetery association. (1992)