Lone Oak Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Lone Oak Cemetery, out in Guadalupe County. Now settle in, because this one starts with a meeting and ends, as so many good Texas stories do, with the land itself. January 17, 1897.

A cold month, and German immigrants living in the Geronimo area gathered at Specht School to talk about something every community eventually has to face. They needed a place to bury their dead. A proper place.

A community place. So right there at that schoolhouse, they did what German immigrants tended to do when something needed doing. They organized.

They formed what they called a friedhof gesellschaft, a cemetery association, and they didn't let the grass grow under their boots about it either. Within a single week of that meeting, the association had purchased a five-acre plot of land from a man named Ernst Puls, and they gave it a name: Lone Oak Cemetery. Now here is where the story takes a quiet, heavy turn.

The very first burial at Lone Oak, the first soul laid to rest in that newly purchased ground, was the one-week-old, unnamed son of Ernst and Bertha Puls. The same Ernst Puls who had sold them the land. You sit with that a moment.

The man who gave the ground received, almost immediately, the ground's first sorrow. Since that founding, more than nine hundred burials have taken place at Lone Oak, and several older nineteenth-century graves have been relocated there as well, so the cemetery holds not just those who came after, but some who came before. Nine hundred souls, and counting, all of them resting on five acres that a community decided, in the cold heart of January 1897, that they needed.

Turns out they were right.

What the marker says

On January 17, 1897, German immigrants living in the Geronimo area met at Specht School to discuss the need for a community cemetery. The group formed a "friedhof gesellschaft," or cemetery association, and within a week purchased a five-acre plot of land from Ernst Puls and designated it the Lone Oak Cemetery. The following year the first burial, that of the one-week-old, unnamed son of Ernst and Bertha Puls, took place. Since its founding, over 900 burials have taken place, and several older 19th century graves have been relocated here as well. (1992) [Historic Texas Cemetery medallion added 2020]