The Tobey Community Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. The Nat Tobey family came a long way to get here. All the way from Indiana, rolling into northeast Burnet County sometime in the 1850s, looking for a place to put down roots in the Texas Hill Country.

Seems they found it. By 1868, two of the sons, Avery and Samuel, had bought land right there in Backbone Valley. A good name for a place, Backbone Valley.

The kind of name that tells you something about the ground and the people both. Now, communities need three things to really take hold. A place to pray, a place to learn, and a place to lay the dead to rest.

The Tobeys got all three. A church went up. A school went up.

And in 1872, the cemetery opened. It opened, as so many do, with the death of a child. N.

W. Tobey, twelve years old, was the first to be buried there. That's the weight the ground carries from the very beginning.

The church and the school served the ranches and farms all through Backbone Valley. Generations of valley people sent their children to that school, bowed their heads in that church, and walked that cemetery road. Within a century, more than two hundred graves had been placed in that burial ground.

Two hundred lives, two hundred stories, all of them rooted in the same stretch of Hill Country soil. But communities change. The 20th century came through and phased out the church.

Phased out the school. One by one, the landmarks went quiet. By 1964, only the cemetery remained.

And so that year, folks formed the Tobey Cemetery Association, dedicated to caring for the one landmark still standing. The last place in Backbone Valley where you can still walk among the Tobeys and their neighbors and feel the full weight of what it meant to build something out here. Two hundred graves and a name on a valley.

That's not nothing. That's everything.

What the marker says

The Nat Tobey family moved from Indiana to northeast Burnet County in the 1850s. Sons Avery and Samuel bought land here in Backbone Valley in 1868. At the death of N. W. Tobey, aged 12, this cemetery was opened in 1872. A church and school stood nearby, serving people of the ranches and farms of the valley. Within a century, over 200 graves were placed in this burial ground. In 1964 Tobey Cemetery Association was formed to care for the one remaining community landmark, since church and school were phased out in the 20th century. (1976)