Oatmeal Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'll tell it to you. Out in Burnet County, there's a place called the Oatmeal community, and at the edge of it sits a cemetery that holds the memory of the people who were here first. The oldest documented burials go back to September 16, 1854.

That's the date the records show for Mary Smith and her year-old daughter, Fanny. Mother and child, both gone on the same day. Whatever took them, it took them together, and the ground of what would become this cemetery received them first.

You don't rush past that. Some stories earn their silence. Now, the land those two acres sat on didn't become official cemetery ground right away.

It wasn't until 1871 that Mr. and Mrs. J. L.

Roundtree deeded that two-acre parcel, the land containing the graves, making it permanent, making it real in the eyes of the law. By then, others had already joined Mary and Fanny in that ground. Pioneers of the Oatmeal community, the marker calls them, the earliest ones.

And the community kept coming. Veterans of the Civil War found their rest here. So did men who served in the First World War, and men who served in the Second.

The cemetery that started with a mother and her baby grew into a roll call of American history. In 1945, a cemetery association formed to maintain the place, to keep it from being swallowed by time and cedar and forgetting. And in 1983, a land acquisition enlarged the grounds from two acres to three, making room, as communities always have to do, for what comes next.

Three acres now. One association still tending it. And somewhere in that ground, the oldest names of all: Mary Smith, and little Fanny, who didn't quite make it to her second year, but made it into the record, and into the story, and into this.

What the marker says

Some of the earliest pioneers of the Oatmeal community are interred in this cemetery. The oldest documented burials are those of Mary Smith and her year-old daughter, Fanny, both of whom died on September 16, 1854. Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Roundtree deeded the two acres of land containing the cemetery in 1871. Among those interred here are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. An additional land acquisition in 1983 enlarged the cemetery to three acres. A cemetery association formed in 1945 maintains the historic graveyard.