DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight. Out here in Fort Bend County, there's a place called Snake Creek Cemetery, and if you slow down long enough to read the stones, you get the whole story of a community — right there in the grass. The names carved into those tombstones read like a roll call of early settlers: Hodges, Boon, Boone, Darst, Davis, Gill, Armstrong, Hartgraves, Hughes, Kennelly, Scott, Simpson, Smith, Snedecor, Sims, Tarver, West.
Each one a family, each one a life planted in this stretch of Texas ground. Now, two of those names carry a particular weight. Emory H.
Darst and John P. Gill — both veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto — are buried right here. Think about that for a moment.
Men who stood at one of the most consequential moments in Texas history, now resting quiet in Fort Bend County alongside their neighbors and kin, including several Confederate veterans laid to rest in the same soil. The land for this graveyard didn't appear out of thin air. Back in the 1850s, two men made it possible: William Cole, who granted land for the cemetery, and Peter L.
West, who did the same — and who, as it turns out, is himself buried here on the very ground he gave. There's something fitting about that, a man resting on his own gift. And west of the cemetery, for many years, a community church stood and served the people of Snake Creek — Sunday mornings, weddings, funerals, all of it.
Then came 1932, and with it, a hurricane that didn't negotiate. The church was destroyed. The congregation's gathering place, gone.
But the cemetery remains. The names remain. And out here on this Texas road, that's not nothing — that's everything.
What the marker says
Tombstones in this cemetery reflect early settlers who lived in Snake Creek community: Hodges, Boon, Boone, Darst, Davis, Gill, Armstrong, Hartgraves, Hughes, Kennelly, Scott, Simpson, Smith, Snedecor, Sims, Tarver, West. Two veterans of the Battle of san Jacinto, Emory H. Darst and John P. Gill are buried here, as are several Confederate veterans. Land for the graveyard was granted in the 1850s by william Cole and by Peter L. West, who is buried here. A community church west of the cemetery served residents many years until destroyed during a 1932 hurricane.