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A home of Elgin history is now a home of state history.
Elgin Mexican Cemetery has been designated as a Historical Texas Cemetery by the Texas Historical Commission. The cemetery joins 25 others in Bastrop County with the same designation.
Debbie Wahrmund addressed the City Council March 7 about the new designation and other updates on the cemetery. She lauded the council, volunteers and others for work on the cemetery and getting to this point.
“I didn’t know how to protect this precious cemetery. It was overgrown,” Wahrmund told the council. “Because of you and many other people, I became to know it.”
Elgin Mexican Cemetery is located near the city’s water tower. There are about 115 graves — 82 marked and 43 unmarked graves. People buried include 10 Woodmen of the World and one veteran of World War I who died in 1930.
As recounted in sesquicentennial stories last year, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 prompted many people to move north to Bastrop County and nearby Sayersville for mining, then later in Elgin working at the brickyards and railroad. The earliest grave is 1904, one year after the railroad built the Elgin Union Depot. Traveling priests performed marriages a few blocks from the cemetery in the little wooden Catholic church, which no longer stands from 1880-1936.
