Hanson Cemetery

Hanson Cemetery was already well established by 1925, when brothers J.H. and J.G. Walton and J.H.'s wife Annie Warsham Walton formally granted about one acre for a community burial ground, as settlers of the Roch community had already buried more than fifty people there. The community of Roch, named for Captain John Bernard Roch, included homesteads scattered along what became the Comyn Highway (FM 1496) and County Roads 434 and 438. The earliest burial is William Hanson, whose worn grave marker indicates he died in either 1870 or 1871. Tradition holds that Hanson and M. Walton, neighbors who hunted along Sowell Creek, agreed that whoever died first would be buried under oak trees along the creek and that the cemetery would bear his name. The later burial of Hanson's wife, Martha Dunn Hanson, began the Hanson cemetery, and the Dunn and Walton families also had significant burial plots in its old section. For many years the Hanson Cemetery Committee, chaired by J.P. Thompson, cared for the grounds and grave sites, and after Thompson's death in 1941 a Hanson Cemetery Association was formed to continue the upkeep; the association incorporated in 1985. In 1998, a veterans memorial was erected to honor veterans interred there.

Texas · United States