Starr Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight off Starr Hill in Anderson County. There's a family graveyard out here, and if you slow down long enough to listen, it'll tell you something about what it meant to plant roots in Texas and never let go. This is the story of the Starr Cemetery.

John Starr came into this world in 1797, and when he left it in 1872, they laid him right here, in the ground he'd claimed as his own. A Texas pioneer, the marker calls him, and that word pioneer carries a lot of weight if you say it slow. He doesn't rest alone.

His wife Susannah is right there beside him, the way you'd expect after a life built together on this land. Now John and Susannah had eight children. Eight.

And six of them, when their time came, were brought back to this same piece of ground. That's a family that stuck. Of those sons buried here, two of them served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

The marker doesn't linger on what that cost them. It doesn't have to. You can feel it in the quiet.

Up on nearby Starr Hill, the ancestral home still stands, close enough that the living and the gone have always been neighbors on this ridge. Six of eight children. A husband and wife, side by side.

A home just over the rise. Some families scatter to the wind. The Starrs, they stayed.

What the marker says

Family graveyard of the descendants of John Starr (1797 - 1872), Texas pioneer. First person buried here, Starr lies beside wife Susannah. Interred nearby are 6 of their 8 children; 2 of the sons here served in the Confederate Army, Civil War. Ancestral home is on nearby Starr Hill. (1969)