DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at Sunset Cemetery tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight. This is Duane, and this one deserves a quiet moment before we roll. Out in Kerr County, there's a four-acre patch of ground called Sunset Cemetery.
And like a lot of Texas burial grounds, the land itself came from more than one place — acquired over the years from the A. E. Oehler heirs, from M.
D. Henderson, and from Sunset School, which closed its doors in 1953. Three pieces of ground, stitched together to hold the stories of the people who came before.
Now, local tradition holds that the very first person laid to rest here was someone by the name of M. B. Shults.
The marker doesn't give us much more than that — just the name, and the weight of being first. But the earliest marked graves — that's a different matter, and a harder one to tell. James and Susan Dowdy had brought their family out to this country, migrating from Goliad.
And in 1878, not long after they arrived, four of their children were killed by Indians. Four children. The Dowdy family had barely put down roots, and the ground took them anyway.
Those are the earliest marked graves in Sunset Cemetery, and you don't need embellishment to feel the weight of that. A few years on, in the 1880s, typhoid swept through, the way it did in those times — quiet and merciless. Four children of the Byas family were taken by the epidemic.
Plain stones mark where they lie. No ornamentation, no grand inscription. Just stone, and the fact of it.
And then there's H. L. Nelson, born in 1835, died in 1922 — an early pioneer, the marker calls him, the man who established the Mountain Home Post Office.
He's out there too, in that four-acre stretch of Kerr County ground. Sunset Cemetery holds all of them — the first arrivals, the children taken too soon, the pioneers who built something lasting. The land closed around them, one by one, and it's still holding.
What the marker says
The earliest marked graves in this cemetery are those of James and Susan Dowdy's four children. They were killed by Indians in 1878, soon after the family migrated from Goliad. However, local tradition says the first interment in that of M. B. Shults. Plain stones mark burial sites of four Byas children who died in the 1880s typhoid epidemic. Early pioneer H. L. Nelson (1835-1922), who established Mountain Home Post Office, is buried here. Land for this 4-acre cemetery has been acquired from the A. E. Oehler heirs, M. D. Henderson, and Sunset School when it closed in 1953. (1979)