Shiloh Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker at Shiloh Cemetery tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, every cemetery has a first soul, a first name, a first moment when a patch of ground becomes something more than dirt. At Shiloh, that moment came in 1857, and the name was John Uzell.

Fourteen years old. Think on that a moment. Fourteen years old, and he became, in a way, the cornerstone of this place.

The land belonged to a man named Isaac H. Cavender, Sr., and Cavender was related to young Uzell. So when the boy was laid to rest there, it wasn't a stranger's field.

It was family ground. And Cavender, to his credit, opened that ground to others. Neighbor after neighbor, family after family, and before long the place had a name: Shiloh Cemetery, borrowing the name of the surrounding community it called home.

For many years, the cemetery had a neighbor of its own, right next door. An adjacent schoolhouse, and that schoolhouse did double duty. Come Sunday, the Baptist congregation would gather there for services.

That log cabin was built in 1868, and it served the Baptist Church faithfully for decades, until the congregation finally built its own sanctuary in 1898. Thirty years of Sundays in a schoolhouse. There's something I find quietly remarkable about that.

The community of Shiloh had one more anchor in those years: a general store, operated by a man named Robert M. Long, keeping the community supplied right on through to the end of the nineteenth century. Now walk through the gates of Shiloh Cemetery today and you're walking through the family tree of an entire frontier community.

Kennard. Williams. McAda.

Cavender. Black. Young.

Musgrave. May. Coble.

Johnson. Those names are carved in stone, and many of the graves date all the way back to the 1800s. Some of those grave sites are marked.

Some are not. The ground holds more stories than the stones can tell. But here's the thing about Shiloh.

It hasn't been forgotten and it hasn't been left to the weeds. The Shiloh Cemetery Association looks after this place, and many of the descendants of those very pioneer families, the ones whose names are on those tombstones, still live right here in the area. The roots go deep in Atascosa County.

Deep as the first grave dug there in 1857 for a fourteen-year-old boy named John Uzell, on land belonging to his kin.

What the marker says

The first burial in this graveyard, that of fourteen-year-old John Uzell, took place in 1857. The land at that time belonged to Isaac H. Cavender, Sr., who was related to Uzell. Cavender allowed other burials on his property and soon the graveyard became known as the Shiloh Cemetery, taking its name from the surrounding community. For many years the cemetery was associated with an adjacent schoolhouse that also was used for Baptist church services. The log cabin, built in 1868, served the Baptist Church until the congregation built its own sanctuary in 1898. The Shiloh community also was served until the end of the nineteenth century by a general store that was operated by Robert M. Long. Many of the graves in the Shiloh Cemetery date from the 1800s. Some of the family names appearing on the tombstones include Kennard, Williams, McAda, Cavender, Black, Young, Musgrave, May, Coble, and Johnson. Many of the descendants of these pioneer families still live in the area. The Shiloh Cemetery, which contains both marked and unmarked grave sites, is cared for by the Shiloh Cemetery Association. (1985)