Mt. Pisgah Church and Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Leon County, there's a place called Mt. Pisgah, and if that name sounds like it carries some weight, well, it does.

The cemetery came first, or at least that's how it feels when you stand there. Records don't actually say when it was started. That's the first thing you have to reckon with.

The beginning is missing. What the earliest marked grave tells us is this: a child named John W. Orenbaum, born in 1852, gone by 1854.

That's where the written record picks up. But local tradition holds that the ground was already holding people before that small stone was ever set. Earlier burials, unmarked, unnamed in any ledger.

The land knows more than the paperwork does. Buried across that cemetery are many of the area's pioneers, and the generations kept adding to them. Veterans of the Texas Revolution are in that ground.

Veterans of the Civil War. Veterans of World War I and World War II. And then there are the victims of an early influenza epidemic, a quiet catastrophe folded into the same soil as the fighters.

In 1855, Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church was organized, and a building went up next to the cemetery, a structure of hewn logs that people called the Board Shanty. It stood there, rough-cut and plain, the way early Texas things tended to be.

Then in 1892, it was moved. Where it went, the marker doesn't say. Some things just leave.

What stays is the cemetery, the church, and a record with a gap at the very beginning, which is maybe the most honest thing about it.

What the marker says

Although records do not indicate when the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery was started, the earliest marked grave is that of John W. Orenbaum (1852-1854). According to local tradition, the graveyard may also contain earlier unmarked burials. Interred in the cemetery are many area pioneers, veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, and victims of an early influenza epidemic. Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church was organized in 1855. A building of hewn logs, called the Board Shanty, was erected next to the cemetery. It was moved in 1892. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986