My aunt shared this post with me. A gentleman who works at Producers Cooperative, William Lazenby, stumbled onto an old cemetery on private property that contains the graves of Amos Gates and his family. Pretty cool stuff.
The post is at https://www.facebook.com/william.lazenby.9/posts/1418574821534602.
The post is at https://www.facebook.com/william.lazenby.9/posts/1418574821534602.
Quote:
Today I was asked to go look at a ranch in Washington County with a couple of other Producers employees. This ranch is between 2000 and 3000 acres. The pastures need to be sprayed with herbicide to control weeds and some brush. We needed to scout the target species and determine what product(s) fit the job as well as scouting the terrain before putting our big spray rigs in here. While we are doing this for the man who is leasing the place. I know the previous owner but I didn't know the complete history of the ranch. It lies along the Brazos River just a short distance from where the Navasota River intersects it. At this confluence is the historic town known as Washington-on-the-Brazos. Hopefully you passed Eighth Grade Texas History and remember it is the place where Texas pioneers signed the Texas Declaration of Independence (including Newton County's Claiborne West). The Texians were rushing the process. They had just learned their brothers-in-arms at the Alamo had all been put to the sword at the hands of Santa Anna's army. They had to presume he would soon be here to do the same thing to them. They finished the document and got it signed on March 2nd, 1836 - 181 years ago today. The Texas equivalent of being a historic blue blood is to be able to trace your family line back to one of these signers or perhaps one of veterans of the Texas Revolution. For many Texans, the pinnacle of "blue bloodless" is to be able to claim ancestory back to "The Old Three Hundred", Father of Texas Stephen F. Austin's first 300 settler families. The cattleman with the grazing lease on the place had told us that there was an old abandoned cemetery in one of the big pastures. As we were driving through one of them, we stumbled upon it. It was surrounded by a crumbling rock wall and a wrought iron fence, barely keeping the cows out. I went inside and found the tombstones under assault from brush, McCartney Rose, greenbrier and dewberry vines. There were only seven or eight stones inside with several that were completely illegible from wear. One of them; however, was identified by a Texas Centennial (1936) marker as Amos Gates. Gates was one of Austin's Old Three Hundred, coming to Texas from Kentucky with Captain Abner kuykendall (Marshall E. Kuykendall) in 1821. Gates would ride with Kuykendall in retaliatory expeditions against Indian raiders on the widely scattered settlers cabins. Gates was the first settler in what is today's Washington County (Brenham). He was born in 1799. When he died here in 1883, he was said to be the oldest man in the county. One of the identifiable stones is that of his son, a Civil War veteran. Worn away stones are believed to include his.mother, his sister and her husband. While I'm saddened to see the neglected condition of this old cemetery, I feel blessed that I got to see it on a beautiful Texas spring day.
