Texas State Cemetery

The city’s namesake, Stephen F. Austin, is the best-known resident of this East Side cemetery, established by the state in 1851. Judge Edwin Waller, who laid out the grid plan for Austin’s streets and later served as mayor, also rests here, as do eight former Texas governors, various fighters in Texas’s battles for independence, author James Michener, and Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to the U.S. Congress (in 1996, she became the first African American to gain admittance to these grounds). Perhaps the most striking monument is one sculpted by Elisabet Ney, for the tomb of Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who died at the Battle of Shiloh. Interestingly, in the 1990s, restoring the graveyard’s grounds was a pet project of Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, a politician who was nothing if not resourceful. Unable to get funding from the state legislature, Bullock had the narrow drive that runs through the cemetery officially designated as a state highway so he could allocate funds from the Texas Department of Transportation. (Note the highway signs at the entrances.) Bullock himself resides here now, in quite a fancy tomb.