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The first settlers on the Lampasas River Basin were servicemen who received land grants after gaining Texas’ Independence or men who came in search of grassland for their herds. Located south of Cedar Knob Mountain, this historic cemetery is the final resting place for many of the area’s early pioneers. Parker Milton Levy (1819-1882) came from Tennessee in 1842 in search of grassland. He met and married Mary Elizabeth McNutt (1830-1858) in 1843, daughter of Major Robert McNutt who owned land in the area. When Elizabeth died while giving birth to her fourth child in 1858, she was buried on the homesite, thus creating the Levy Cemetery, later known as Burriss Cemetery, later relocated here. Parker remarried Sarah A. Bruce (1835-1909) and went on to have an additional nine children. In 1876, a 15-wagon caravan traveled from Reynolds County, Missouri, to this area that included John Wiley Allen, Sr. (1835-1880) and wife Julia Thornton Allen (1851-1944). Soon after the caravan’s arrival, a small child died and the owner of land south of the mountain, Silas Burks (1848-1905), donated ten acres for a cemetery, creating Cedar Knob Cemetery. In 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased 282 spaces from the Cedar Knob Cemetery Association for the Relocation of Ten Cemeteries that were to be moved from the lower bottom lands of the Lampasas River for construction of the Stillhouse Dam. The relocated cemeteries were the Burriss, Keys Valley, Wilkinson Valley, Gotcher, Benjamin Ellis, Barker and four unknown cemeteries with burials dating to 1848/1850. |
