With the construction of the Santa Fe railroad in 1886, Santa Anna grew rapidly and developed as a cattle shipping point. According to oral history, W.C. Brooks was the first person buried in Santa Anna Cemetery before the railroad was completed, although no grave marker is present. His son, Lewis Brooks, gave the first section of land for the cemetery for his burial. The oldest dated monument belongs to sixteen-year-old Mary E. Ashley (1869-1885). Those buried here also include L.V. Stockard (1858-1923), Santa Anna’s first railroad station agent, and his wife, Cora (Willett) Stockard (1860-1907), Texas Ranger and County Sheriff John R. Banister (1854-1918) and his wife, Emma D. Banister (1871-1956), and fellow Texas Ranger John Benecke Bachman (1820-1906). The cemetery has a traditional landscape with concrete, fieldstone, granite, and sandstone grave markers and a variety of natural and cultural trees, shrubs, and groundcover. It is the burial place of twenty-eight known Civil War veterans, the oldest of them George Williams (1848-1897) of the Tennessee Cavalry CSA, and it also contains graves of veterans of the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Fraternal sections represent burials of Free Masons, members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Woodmen of the World, and members of the Order of the Eastern Star. The Santa Anna Cemetery Association, formed in 1943, continues to care for the cemetery with volunteer workdays and events.