26 SHARING THE PAST
One hundred and fifty- seven years ago, a small group of Boerne area residents organized the Boerne Graveyard Board to establish a common burial ground for the community.
H.G. Froebel, Board secretary, collected $178 from 33 residents in exchange for burial plots. Each person who paid $2 in specie (coin) received a nine-foot by fourand- a-half-foot burial plot. The funds were used to survey the land and build a rock wall around it.
On Oct. 7, 1867, Froebel paid $1 on behalf of the board to Adam Vogt “for building a graveyard for Precinct No. 1 of the County of Kendall of the State of Texas ... all that certain piece or portion of land containing one acre and 4.357 square varas ...” located on the San Antonio-Fredericksburg Road, now North School Street.
Only two small portions of the original rock wall remain, but the original layout of the cemetery is still visible when entering through the main gate. The plots adjacent to the wall were laid out, with the wall running behind the tombstones and the graves facing the center of the cemetery. This section is the resting place for early settlers who established Boerne and Kendall County.
Tombstones facing east, west, north and south show the outline of the original rock wall. The graves in the middle face east.
The northwest corner is anchored by the graves of Joseph Graham, Kendall County’s first Chief Justice, and George Wilkins Kendall, the county’s namesake. In 1989, the Kendall County Historical Commission placed a historical marker next to Kendall’s grave.
Adam Vogt, the first county judge, is buried in the northeast corner, and William Dietert, who owned and operated the first grist mill on Cibolo Creek, is buried in the southeast corner.
Adam Vogt sold the land surrounding the cemetery in February of 1872. The new owner, Ferdinand Simon, had the tract surveyed and subdivided the following month.
In July, he sold 1.9 acres of land to “... the Board of Wardens of the graveyard of the town Boerne.”
Froebel, acting as board secretary, paid $25 for the addition, located between the east wall of the cemetery and the San Antonio-Fredericksburg Road. Regine Clauss bought the 53 acres behind the cemetery and in September of 1881, she and her husband C.H. Clauss accepted $50 from “... Henry Wendler, Charles Dinger, and Henry Vogt, wardens of the cemetery of the town of Boerne” for 1,000 square varas of land on the south side of the cemetery.
Today, the cemetery contains 30 acres.
In 1986, during the Texas Sesquicentennial, the Boerne Cemetery received recognition from the Kendall County Historical Commission, which placed a Texas Historical Commission marker to share its early history. In 2001, the cemetery received a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.
The Champion High School welding classes recently built and installed a beautiful new archway to enhance the main entrance. The archway bears the inscription, “Boerne Cemetery, Ruhe in Frieden, Est. 1867, Rest in Peace.”
The Genealogical Society of Kendall County, the Patrick Heath Public Library, and Boerne Parks and Recreation will host their fourth annual Cemetery Tour beginning at 10 a.m. on Oct. 26. The tour is free and open to the public.
Reenactors will share the lives of 13 individuals, featuring a Wells Fargo agent, organizer of the Boerne Village Band and the Boerne Gensangverein, a Union veteran, and one of the organizers of the first Boerne Public Library.
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