Six Mile Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Six Mile Cemetery, out in Llano County, has been holdin the stories of this community since the early 1880s, and some stories start quiet, with a patch of ground and a gift. William A. and Jane E.

Stephens, early residents of this farming and ranching community called Six Mile, donated the land for a burial ground in 1883. That's how a cemetery begins. Not with ceremony, necessarily, but with somebody saying: here, take this land, because people are going to need a place to rest.

The earliest marked grave belongs to Charles Oscar Turner, the infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Munn Turner, who died in December of 1883 at five months of age. Five months.

You let that sit for a moment before you move on. In the same ground, in the rows that followed across the decades, Six Mile Cemetery received veterans. Men who had served in the Civil War.

Men who had fought in frontier battles with Native Americans. Men who went to World War I, and men who went to World War II. Different wars, different eras, the same soil in Llano County holding all of them.

Since 1987, a cemetery association has kept the place maintained, tended, remembered. Some patches of ground earn that kind of care. This one has been earning it since 1883.

What the marker says

Six Mile Cemetery has served residents of Six Mile since the early 1880s. William A. and Jane E. Stephens, early residents of this farming and ranching community, donated land for a burial ground in 1883. The earliest marked grave is that of Charles Oscar Turner, the infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Munn Turner, who died in December 1883 at five months of age. Also interred here are veterans of the Civil War, frontier battles with Native Americans, World War I, and World War II. The cemetery has been maintained by a cemetery association since 1987.