May 8, 2021
Kristi and I made a trip to Rockdale, Texas to find the graves of my great grandparents, William Robert Glasgow and Martha Jefferson Largent. But before we headed to the cemetery we ate lunch at Brett’s Backyard Bar-B-Que and listened to songs about poor life choices performed by a live musician. The food was good, though.
William Glasgow was born in Guadalupe County, Texas in 1864. Martha Largent was born in Sabine Parish, Lousiana in 1862. They married in 1884 in Guadalupe County. Both are buried in Hamilton Chapel cemetery, a small cemetery near Rockdale.
The cemetery is all that is left of the Hamilton Chapel community. And although there are burials located here as recently as 2001, most of the graves date from the early-20th century back to the mid-19th century.
I’m forever grateful to my brother, Jim Nichols, for finding this information. Until recently I was not aware that any of my direct Glasgow ancestors, except my father, were buried in Texas.
After visiting the cemetery, we headed home via Burleson County. Google Maps indicated a church along a county road that started off the highway, so we took a detour to go find it.
Route: Roads in Burleson County
Burleson County Road 319, like many of the county roads in that area, is paved. I guess all that oil they pull out of the ground around there lets them be fancy like that. Anyway, we found no sign of the church. We suspected that it was one of those “ghost churches” that appear on maps, but actually disappeared a long time ago.
But we weren’t disappointed. We continued down the road and a short while later came to a large patch of larkspur that was growing in the ditch. The flowers were teeming with dozens and dozens of Blue Swallowtail butterflies! It was a good opportunity to stop and take some pictures.
Now, the butterflies were enough, I’d say, to make turning down this road worthwhile; but then something else happened that put the cherry on top of this proverbial butterflycream larkspur cake: a real-life American Bumblebee showed up!
Bumblebees are rare, and at first I doubted my eyes. Carpenter bees are pretty common in this part of Texas and, “Surely,” I thought, “I just missed the markings.” I followed the little (big!) gal around for a while, trying to get a decent picture. Below is the best that I was able to get, but after observing it and examining the many blurry images that I got of it, I’m 99.9% convinced that it was, in fact, a bumblebee. (If you know better, I don’t want to hear about it in the comments. I want to live in my delusion, if that’s what I’m doing.)
We continued down CR 319 to CR 320, then CR 324 and CR 375, passing through woods and pastures. CR 375 ended at State Highway 21 a little south of Caldwell, Texas.
I highly recommend taking an unplanned detour every now and then. You never know what treasures you might find. One treasure that I brought home was poison ivy that I picked up at the cemetery. Worth it, though.
