Old Nixon Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to give it its due. Out here in Guadalupe County, there's a piece of ground that holds onto a story most folks have long forgotten. It's called the Old Nixon Cemetery, and if you blink driving past, you might miss the last visible reminder of an entire community that once called this place home.

That community grew up here in the mid-nineteenth century, and it carried the name of a man called Robert T. Nixon. Just Nixon, plain and simple, at first.

But then another town over in Gonzales County laid claim to that same name, and suddenly this settlement needed a distinction. So Old Nixon it became, and Old Nixon it stayed. The town itself faded, but the cemetery remained.

Before it was the Old Nixon Cemetery, it went by another name entirely. Stockton Cemetery. That name came from Gabriel C.

Stockton, who formally set aside this ground in the deed records, making it official, making it permanent, or at least as permanent as anything gets out here on the Texas plain. The earliest documented grave belongs to Nancy McLean, born in 1802 and laid to rest in 1867. She got here first, in the way that matters most in a cemetery.

And she was followed, over the years, by members of the Nixon families, the Ramages, the Ranfts, and others whose names the marker calls pioneer families. They built something here. The town didn't last, but they made sure this ground would.

Sometimes a cemetery is all that's left to prove a community ever existed at all, and this one is doing exactly that job.

What the marker says

This graveyard is the last visible reminder of the Old Nixon Community, which grew up here in the mid-19th century. The settlement was named for Robert T. Nixon and became known as Old Nixon after another town in Gonzales County took the Nixon name. The cemetery, which was first known as Stockton Cemetery, was formally set aside in the deed records by Gabriel C. Stockton. The earliest documented grave is that of Nancy McLean (1802-1867). Also interred here are members of the Nixon, Ramage, Ranft, and other pioneer families. (1989)