If you didn't know it was here, you wouldn't know it was here. Blasterz had to climb over a fence to get in.
Williamson Creek Cemetery is located on Little Texas Lane between Mira Drive and the I-35, just south of Stassney Lane in far south Austin.
Here is the link to the cemetery listing on Find-A-Grave: (
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Williamson Creek is the final resting place of former slaves and their descendants. In 2000, it got some some attention and an overdue clean-up: (
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"153-Year-Old Cemetery Is Rejuvenated:
Young Latter-day Saint Volunteers Pitch In to Restore Historic Graveyard
By Francisco Vara-Orta
Austin American-Statesman Staff
Volunteers handle heavy lifting during a day of cleanup at Williamson Creek Cemetery, a historically African-American graveyard.
Edna Satterwhite's heart would break on every visit to her relatives buried in the Williamson Creek Cemetery. Trips to visit the gravesites of her grandfather, parents, five aunts, an uncle, and a nephew were tough enough for her physically. But the chest-high brush and weeds in the historic South Austin cemetery left her emotionally frustrated.
"I used to come out frequently to clean up the headstones and made sure their graves looked clean," the 82-year-old said. "But now that I got this walker and I'm older, I couldn't clean it up anymore. I could barely even see where my mama was buried."
Satterwhite's aquamarine eyes gleamed Saturday morning as she watched 350 youth volunteers of 20 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregations from Austin and San Antonio revitalize the 153-year-old African-American cemetery on Little Texas Lane, near Stassney Lane and Interstate 35.
"I think God sent them," Satterwhite said.
Mason Smith, a 17-year-old from San Marcos, said he listened carefully to Satterwhite's story.
"Seeing how Ms. Satterwhite had to come to the cemetery and found the condition of her loved ones' gravesites, we knew it would mean a lot to do the project," Smith said. "We are restoring a legacy today and must be aware of the slavery history in our region."
About 260 slaves are buried at the cemetery. The first was James P. Eagle, who died in 1863, said Tony Jones, president of the cemetery association. Jones is a descendant of Alfred Overton, a slave freed by the Emancipation Proclamation who died in 1913.
The other 540 people buried there are slave descendants, one of whom was buried last year.
As the group worked, old markers peeked out again from under brush and dirt. Members of the cemetery association checked to make sure the markers were cataloged in the directory of those buried on the grounds.
Slaves and descendants of slaves are buried in Williamson Creek Cemetery in South Austin, but it had become overgrown with weeds. Volunteers, from left, Valerie Garcia, 14; Kolt Way, 16; Bryce Lyman, 14; Zachary Edwards, 15; and Joshua Stevens, 15, volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, clean a grave site. Photo by Jay Janner, American-Statesman.
Many of the headstones have decayed, and plots are sunken in, but Jones said the cemetery association hopes to pick up where the youth left off.
"Seeing the cemetery in better shape makes me feel that we are rejuvenating our African-American roots today," Jones said. "It would have been costly to fix it up, but now we are in a better place to keep it up."
Jones said the cleanup isn't good just for the relatives of those buried there but also for Austin and its understanding of lesser-known post-Civil War African-American history.
As the restoration wound down Saturday, Jones and other volunteers laid down a new pathway of rocks and mulch and prepared to mount a historical marker presented to the cemetery association by the Texas Historical Commission in 2000.
Saturday's cleanup at Williamson Creek Cemetery wasn't limited to gravestones. Viliami Kaufusi trimmed a tree at the graveyard, which is the final resting place of about 800 people. Photo by Jay Janner, American-Statesman.
"It may be odd to say this," Satterwhite said, "but I know that I'll look forward to visiting (the cemetery) again. Hopefully, other people will be able to appreciate what it means.""
And an article about encroaching development and its impact on this cemetery from the New York Times: (
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"Growth of Texas Cities Pushes the Dead Aside
By ROSS E. MILLOY
SEPT. 11, 2000
Twenty-five years ago, anyone in the market for a tomb with a view would have been hard pressed to top Williamson Creek Cemetery, perched on a shady hill in a grove of cedar trees, looking out over a peaceful valley of rolling pasture just south of town.
"There were no buildings anywhere in sight, and all you could hear were birds and wildlife calling to each other. It was serene and spiritual," said Karen R. Thompson, president of Save Texas Cemeteries, a preservation group.
Today, Williamson Creek Cemetery overlooks the parking lot of a multiscreen Cineplex, and the sounds now are traffic from a nearby Interstate and the roar of bulldozers carving roads for a shopping mall.
Austin's sprawling growth has overtaken the cemetery and will soon encircle it.
"We've got 10 cemeteries near Austin that we're concerned about, and statewide we lose at least one a month to developers just paving them over," said Mrs. Thompson, 56. "That's a tragedy, because when we destroy a cemetery, we destroy history."
As population growth explodes in the South and West, yet another issue has emerged: some cities have so many new residents that they are encroaching on cemeteries.
Similar issues exist in other states, but the problem is particularly pronounced in Texas.
Here, the complex legal history of land titles and land-use issues -- which can include Spanish and Mexican land grants -- and at times, the clouded ownership status of cemetery property, have made the Legislature reluctant to address cemetery preservation. County governments also do not have the power to enact ordinances to protect cemeteries. "It's an enormous problem all over the state," said Gerron Hite, cemetery preservation coordinator for the Texas State Historical Commission, who puts the number of cemeteries in Texas at 40,000 to 50,000.
The state is conducting a $1.1 million study in 107 counties, chosen because of their rate of growth, to identify cemeteries that might be threatened.
Many of those cemeteries began as family burial sites in the 19th century but became community burial grounds as towns grew up around them; others, often isolated and remote, were simply forgotten as families died off or moved.
But the problem illustrates how Texas has changed in 50 years, with the past, as represented by the old cemeteries, giving way to creeping urbanization, Mrs. Thompson said.
"It used to be you could pause and reflect in a cemetery," she said. "Nowadays, you just hope you don't get run over."
While the nation's population grew by 9.7 percent from 1990 to 1999, the South grew by 13.7 percent and the West by 15.7 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Texas' population grew 18 percent, to about 20 million.
Much of the growth has been outside the urban core of Texas cities, which is why cemeteries, traditionally built on a city's fringe, are threatened. In the hills around Austin, for example, the population of Williamson County, home of Dell Computers, grew by over 70 percent to 240,000 from 139,000. Hays County, south of Austin, increased 41 percent, to about 92,000 from 65,000 in the same period. In Travis County, which includes Austin, the population increased more than 26 percent, to 727,000 from 576,000.
"It's just phenomenal," said Ryan Robinson, Austin's demographer. "We're in the top tier of the top tier for population growth, and things like this cemetery encroachment issue are undoubtedly symptoms of that growth."
Every two minutes, another acre of Texas farmland is converted into houses, shopping malls or roads, according to a study released in December by the United States Department of Agriculture. Statewide, 1.22 million acres were developed in the years 1992 to 1997, the equivalent of nearly 2,000 square miles, the study reported.
Squeezed between suburban growth and the trend toward highly mechanized farming, cemeteries are suffering, Mr. Hite said. "Our cemeteries' boundaries get smaller every year because of encroachment from agriculture and suburban development."
Laws governing the protection of cemeteries vary around the country, but particularly in Texas, "the laws are old, antiquated and convoluted," Mrs. Thompson said. She described a scene reminiscent of the movie "Poltergeist," in which developers built a subdivision over an Indian burial site.
"In less than 30 minutes a bulldozer can shove all the gravestones into a nearby creek or ravine and clear the site," Mrs. Thompson said. "Under Texas law, that's just a misdemeanor and no one's ever prosecuted. It's a felony if they disturb the bodies, but they don't. They just leave them there and build over them."
And there are other problems, Mr. Hite said.
In older cemeteries, boundaries may not be clearly marked; and headstones may have disappeared or become long since overgrown, making it difficult to know how far even identified burial sites stretch.
At times, the issue can have racial undertones. In many old cemeteries, headstones marking the graves of white residents were made of stone, while those marking the graves of black or Hispanic residents were wood, and quickly deteriorated.
"If you don't even know where something is, how do you protect it?" Mr. Hite asks.
As more people have abandoned farming, entire towns have died, Mr. Hite said, leaving only the graveyard to mark the community's existence.
"We should know better than to do this," Mrs. Thompson said. "All of these people who went on before us should have their histories recorded and protected, not paved over for a Wal-Mart.""