Mager Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm going to tell it to you. Reinhold Mager was born in Brandenburg, Germany, in 1863, and somewhere along the way he made it to Texas. He married Franziska Krueger, born in 1868, a woman who came not from overseas but from right nearby, out of the Dessau community in Travis County.

Together they worked a hundred and fifty acres here in Williamson County, and on that land they built something that outlasted both of them. They gave up one acre of their hundred and fifty to hold a cemetery and a school. One acre set aside, just like that, for the community around them.

The first known burial came in 1900, a man named Albert C. Mager, laid to rest in that donated ground. And the burials kept coming.

Fifty-five known grave sites in all, and when you walk among them, many of the tombstones still speak in German, the language these families carried with them across an ocean and into the Texas soil. Fourteen of those stones mark the graves of infants. Fourteen.

That number sits heavy, and it ought to. The cemetery kept receiving the dead across the decades until 1951, when Franziska Mager herself, born in 1868, was interred there. After that, the burials ceased.

She had the last word in the ground her family gave. Those fifty-five known grave sites stand today as testament to a German heritage that took root right here in the twentieth century, one donated acre at a time.

What the marker says

Reinhold Mager (1863-1930), a native of Brandenburg, Germany, came to Texas and married Franziska Krueger (1868-1951), a native of the Dessau community in nearby Travis County, Texas. The Magers donated one acre of their 150 acres of land here in Williamson County for this cemetery and a school. The first known burial, that of Albert C. Mager, took place in 1900. Many of the tombstones bear inscriptions in German, and 14 mark the graves of infants. Burials in the cemetery ceased after the interment of Franziska Mager in 1951. The 55 known grave sites are testament to the area's 20th-century German heritage. (2000)