I finished up the work on two small cemeteries I encountered in Weir, Texas. I think these cemetery excursions are serving me well by getting my feet wet in research. I managed to find the census entry for one family, which was pretty exciting, as these things go.

Anyway, you can have a look at it over here.

Both of these cemeteries were odd. One was on the edge of the road, right on the edge of a large corn field and was fenced off. The other was literally in someone’s front yard. As far as I have been able to find, neither cemetery has an official name.

I am getting the hang of doing all the .html myself, and while at times the spacing is a bit weird, overall I am happy with my progress.

Now off to Oakwood Cemetery.

I am planning to launch a website soon that deals with all the really dirty, bloody, violent and repressed history in Texas. Some murder victims I want to write about are buried at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin’s oldest cemetery. Finding their graves is going to be difficult, but I have the hope of the stupid on my side, I think!

I added the write up for Old Corn Hill Cemetery over at ghostroses. You can read it here.

Despite the fact that I was initially unimpressed with this cemetery, I ended up very absorbed in the write up. I was fascinated by the sentimental inscriptions on the graves and what these inscriptions indicated about the person who died as well as those left behind.

I was also struck by a lot of the imagery on some of the gravestones. One stone, belonging to a young woman called Jessie May Long, is extremely touching. It’s a little garish, but when you realize that she died very young, leaving behind a young husband, it hits you that about 100 years ago, a bereft man, a boy almost, selected an ornate stone to honor his wife who died before her 21st birthday.

I am also developing an affinity for graves decorated in a personal manner. There were several such graves at Old Corn Hill Cemetery, where you get a very good feel of the character of the person who died, despite the sort of bland headstones that one commonly sees from 1960 to present.

There have been several cases where I wanted to know more about the people whose graves interested me and I joined ancestry.com. That site has already given me some interesting information for the next write up of the two, tiny, unnamed cemeteries we found in Weir, Texas.

The world is a fascinating place. I had no idea how much of it I would be able to discern from the dead and how we honor them.

And thanks to prelud, whose translations for the Czech/German New Corn Hill Cemetery, were extraordinarily helpful. I intend to update that page soon with her translations.

There is a tiny cemetery near my house, then off to Sam Bass cemetery in Round Rock, which has an area where slaves and former slaves were buried.

Then off to Belle Plain so I can photograph the abandoned college.

I have no idea what is fueling my desire to photograph all these dead places, but it is absorbing and I feel like in a short while, I may become a mini-expert on dead places in Texas. I have bought and read lots of books on the topic and have spent untold hours combing the Internet for more information. This makes me very happy for now, however, and I suspect that is all that matters.

You can see what I saw at Holy Trinity Cemetery by clicking here.

This was a good cemetery to start with mainly because it was so foreign to me in terms of religious beliefs (I was raised a Protestant) and because many of the stones were written in a foreign language. By the way, if you are fluent in Czech or German and can help me with some of the translations, let me know.

Anyway, have a look if cemeteries interest you.

Cole and I were driving home and were on a part of 1825 that is just one lane. To the west, there is empty space, nothing but grass and trees, near a small, man-made ditch that has water in it every time it rains. As we drove, we saw a turtle walking slowly from the grass into the road. I looked at Cole and asked, “Are we saving it?” and he said, “Yes!” so we turned into a street that leads into a housing development so that we could go back the other way.

But as I turned, we saw a tall bald man, who had also turned onto the same road, start sprinting back towards the turtle. Thinking that we could drive slowly and prevent traffic at least from the other side from encroaching, I turned back around and slowly drove back to the turtle.

Then the tall man suddenly stopped running. His shoulders slumped and he paused, then began running back towards his car, right at us. I didn’t look at his face. I was looking for the turtle.

It may sound like a cliche, or an attempt to demonize, but a woman in a Yukon who was on her cell phone ran the turtle down without even noticing it was there. She likely thought the road uneven or that she had hit a rock or something. The running man had only been a few feet away when she killed the turtle.

But she’s not important. Women like her never are. Who is important is the bald man who saw the same animal and ran like hell to save it. He matters. The world looks like it is feeding off itself and you are alone in this fight to remain human and suddenly, there is a tall bald man, running, with the same mission as you. The turtle died but people who get out of their cars and sprint to save creatures never stop getting out of their cars and sprinting. I am sure of it.

I am not a good photographer, and my latest hobby is more about knowledge than it is art, but occasionally I manage to pull off a good picture.

There is something very poignant about this stone being broken. The inscription under the hands says, “These hands will clasp in Heaven.” This is the grave of M.A Peyton, wife of W.R. Peyton. It seems so sad that the stone broke in half, but then again, the hands are still holding strong. Sentimentality for the win. (If you can’t see it clearly, click on the pic - it will take you to my Flickr account, where larger sizes can be viewed.)

Because I am not as assertive in my competence as I should be, I didn’t interfere when Cole told me he had the exact coordinates for the Old Corn Hill cemetery. I wondered why this would be easier to find than, say, the address, which I myself had, but it sounded so technical. Who can argue with the exact longitude and latitude of a location versus the vagueries of address? Well, as it turns out, and any geocacher knows this evidently, those readings are often off. As it turned out yesterday, Cole’s coordinates, obtained from the oft-faulty Internet, were off by about 12 miles.

I was nervous in the area we ended up driving around in, in the “Some redneck is going to meet us in the middle of this unpaved road and shoot us,” sort of way. My highly strung nature as of late combined with Cole’s annoyance at my annoyance caused the sort of blow out that would result in divorce in a couple less inured to strife, so we came home, I printed out a Google map, left him at home and found it myself on the first try. Which is what I should have done the first two attempts, but like I said, sometimes I question my competence. Clearly that is a mistake…

Several points:

1) Old Corn Hill is inside Jarrell proper and is not south of New Corn Hill as EVERY SOURCE ON THE INTERWEBZ INDICATED. I have irrefutable evidence that Old Corn Hill is north of New Corn Hill. Annoyed factual pedantry for the win!

2) Old Corn Hill is not a ghost town. I want to sue every source that said it is. It is simply a town that ceased to exist. It was absorbed by another town. Feh to people who don’t understand that difference.

3) Old Corn Hill cemetery is not abandoned. It has the appearance of a desolate prairie scrub cemetery until you get there and see that an entire housing development is across the street and that people drive up and down CR 313 blaring rap and country music near constantly. There are very recent graves there, it was recently mowed, and there were teenagers hanging out there when I arrived. The teenagers and I ignored each other magnificently and a mediocre time was had by all.

4) Old Corn Hill was not visually appealing and not as interesting as New Corn Hill, but there were several graves of note or historical significance, examples of some cemetery symbolism I had read about, and evidence of an extraordinarily high infant mortality rate between 1910-1913. I think I’ll research the latter to see if influenza or some other disease struck Central Texas. I took the pictures and will research diligently - maybe the situation will redeem itself as I work on it.

But overall, meh.

The New Corn Hill write up will be ready today or tomorrow.