Meinecke Cemetery

Duane's take

The official marker for Meinecke Cemetery in Austin County is the one I'm bringin' you now, and it starts, as so many Texas stories do, with the river. Johann Friedrich and Sophie Koyn Meinecke had made it a long way from home. They'd left Bremen, Germany in 1847, crossed an ocean, found their footing in a new land, and settled in Kenney, Texas.

They purchased property from the town's very namesake, a man called Evangelist John Wesley Kenney. The family dug in. They farmed.

They ranched. They educated. By any measure, the Meineckes were becoming people of standing in that community.

And then 1858 came. Two of their sons drowned in the Brazos River. Two boys, gone to that wide brown current.

Johann Friedrich and Sophie did what grieving parents do when the ground beneath them has to mean something. They established a burial ground. Not a public cemetery, not a church plot.

A family graveyard, rooted in their own land, marked in their own language. That cemetery is still there. The stones stand vertical.

Curbing frames the graves. The inscriptions are written in German, the language Johann and Sophie carried with them from Bremen, the language they never let go of even as Texas grew up around them. And Texas has grown up around them, all right.

Urban development has spread out to the historic Kenney community, pushing and filling in the way it does. But that graveyard holds its ground. It sits there as a record of early settlement, and of a family that came from across the world, built something real, suffered something terrible, and chose to mark it with stone rather than let it disappear.

The Brazos took two Meinecke boys. The family made sure the land remembered them anyway.

What the marker says

Johann Friedrich and Sophie Koyn Meinecke established this burial ground in 1858, when two of their sons drowned in the Brazos River. The Meineckes came to Kenney after emigrating from Bremen, Germany in 1847. Johann Friedrich Meinecke purchased property from Evangelist John Wesley Kenney, the town’s namesake, and family members soon established themselves as noted area farmers, ranchers and educators. This family graveyard features vertical stones, curbing and German language inscriptions. Today, urban development has spread to the historic Kenney community, but this cemetery remains as a record of early settlement here and of the pioneering Meinecke family. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2009