Oak Knoll Cemetery

Duane's take

The way the marker tells it, here's what happened out on this piece of Austin County ground. Frederick William Luhn and his wife Marie Louise Starke Luhn purchased six hundred and ninety-seven acres right here in 1848. That is a serious piece of Texas.

Frederick had been born in 1800, Marie Louise in 1827, and together they built a log home on this land and made it theirs. Now, Frederick didn't get a long run at it. He died in 1854, and when he did, he was buried right here on the homestead, just east of that log home.

The land he'd walked and worked became the land that held him. A year after Frederick's death, Marie Louise married John Siegfried, who'd come into the world in 1821. And so the place carried on, under the Siegfried name now, the same ground, a new chapter.

Here's where it gets interesting. As the need arose, and in a place with neighbors and families and the hard facts of frontier life, the need does arise, the Siegfrieds offered the use of that site for burials. No grand proclamation.

Just neighbors taking care of neighbors. By 1870, a small parcel of the land was formally deeded to the fathers of three children who were already interred there. The ground was becoming something beyond one family's homestead.

It was becoming a community's memory. Then came 1889. More burial plots were being sold, more families were being laid to rest, and so an association was formed to bring some order and permanence to the place.

That association has, from those early days right up through the telling of this marker, overseen the funding, the layout, the growth, and the care of this site. Marie Louise Luhn Siegfried lived until 1894. John Siegfried made it to 1898.

They both saw that association take root. What started as one man buried east of a log home in 1854 grew into something that chronicles, as the marker puts it, the lives of generations of Bellville's citizens. That's the thing about a cemetery.

It doesn't just hold the departed. It holds the whole story of a place.

What the marker says

Frederick William (1800-1854) and Marie Louise Starke (1827-1894) Luhn purchased 697 acres here in 1848. When Frederick died in 1854, he was buried on this homestead just east of their log home. A year later, Marie married John Siegfried (1821-1898). As the need arose, the Siegfrieds offered the use of the site for burials. In 1870, a small parcel was deeded to the fathers of three interred children. In 1889, as more burial plots were sold, an association was formed that has, since those early days, overseen the funding, the layout, the growth and the care of this site that chronicles the lives of generations of Bellville's Citizens. Historic Texas Cemetery-2001