Wooten Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Wooten Cemetery, out there in Kimble County. Pull over if you can; this one deserves a quiet moment. Out in the Texas Hill Country, early pioneers had a way of choosing their burial grounds that tells you something about who they were and where they came from.

Remote. Elevated, usually. A place that felt permanent when everything else was still being figured out.

Wooten Cemetery fits that description about as well as any of them. The earliest grave marker in that cemetery belongs to Cornelius Clay Jackson. One year old.

Buried by April of 1880. That's the date that establishes the cemetery itself: not a deed, not a dedication ceremony, but a child's headstone pressed into Hill Country soil. His mother, P.

Jane Jackson, followed him the very next year, 1881, and she is interred nearby. A mother and her baby, separated by a little dirt and a year's worth of grief. There are other graves worth pausing at.

A family plot believed to hold tuberculosis victims (the marker doesn't name them individually, and maybe that's its own kind of mercy). The Allsup family has a prominent plot as well, part of the fabric of this community even in death. But the cemetery carries the name of one man in particular: Simon Lee Wooten.

Born 1830. He served in the Civil War, and when that war ended and the Old South died with it, Wooten came to Texas from Georgia. He lived until 1896, and somewhere along the way this patch of Hill Country ground became his, and then became him.

There's something that echoes out here if you listen for it. A one-year-old boy marks the beginning. A Confederate veteran who outlasted an entire way of life gives the place its name.

And between those two facts lies a community of people who came west, put down roots, and left their names on stones in the limestone soil of Kimble County, which is about as permanent as it gets in this part of the world.

What the marker says

Typical of burial sites chosen by early Texas Hill Country pioneers, Wooten Cemetery was established by April 1880 when one-year-old Cornelius Clay Jackson was buried. His headstone is the earliest grave marker in the cemetery. His mother, P. Jane Jackson, died in 1881 and is interred nearby. Other notable graves include a family group believed to be tuberculosis victims. The plot of the Allsup family is also prominent, as is the grave of Civil War veteran Simon Lee Wooten (1830-1896), for whom the cemetery is named, who came to Texas from Georgia upon the death of the Old South. (1997)