| Marker Text |
Osage first began as a community of new settlers, many from Tennessee and Mississippi, on the Blackland Prairie near spring-fed Harvey’s Creek. The community was deeded ten acres from the Henry Austin five-league survey in 1856, approximately one-quarter acre of which eventually was devoted to a community cemetery. In 1873, an additional acre was purchased for the cemetery. Newly-arrived settlers included the families of Burford, Goode, McLeary, Moore and Shaw. A few citizens of the Republic of Texas also moved to the Harvey’s Creek area when land became available. Six were buried in the Osage Community Cemetery: William B. and Sarah (McMillan) Scates, Robert G. Morgan and two of his daughters, Sallie and Eliza, and Eliza’s husband, James McMillan. Scates, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, was buried in Osage before both he and his wife were reinterred in Austin at the Texas State Cemetery in 1929. The monuments in the cemetery, as old as 1860, vary from handmade sandstone markers and false crypts using stone from Harvey’s Creek to imposing granite and marble obelisks. Masonic emblems and confederate markers are numerous. Not all burials are marked; however, in 2001, a cenotaph was erected with names of forty-six of those known to be buried in the cemetery but for whom there was no existing marker. Standing the test of time, the Osage Community Cemetery remains a quiet testimony to those first men and women who braved the hardship of pioneer life and created a community that lives on in the hearts and minds of many. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2016 |
