Around 1858 Gottfried Pagel and most of his family moved from Willow Springs in Fayette County to a farm six miles southeast of Hallettsville. The area became known as Pagel Settlement.
On December 31, 1875, Ernst Pagel, Adolph Timm, and William Kirchner deeded a total of nine acres to the Lutheran church to be used for a church, parsonage, school and grave yard. A schoolhouse was erected, but to the best of our knowledge the church and parsonage were never built. Today all that is left of the community is the Pagel Settlement Cemetery.
To visit the cemetery, take FM 530 south from Hallettsville. Turn left on County Road 134 which runs through the cemetery. While the markers west of the road were mostly accessible, the markers to the east of it couldn't be seen through the brush before a November 2007 clean-up. Numerous small enclosures, chain-link, iron, and wooden, surround most of the graves. Several of the fenced areas do not contain markers.
With only fifty-one known burials, the Pagel Settlement Cemetery is the final resting place for at least twenty-one immigrants from Germany and Austria. The oldest marker is for Wilhelm K. Gautel who died June 9, 1858. Gottfried Pagel (1800-1873) and his granddaughter, Caroline Fischer Gautel Wiechring, are the only members of the Pagel family buried here. The cemetery holds numerous members of the Bonorden and Meyer families, which may be why some county maps show it as two separate cemeteries, the Meyer and Bonorden Cemeteries, separated by the county road. Previous written references to the cemetery refer to it as the Pagel Settlement or, sometimes, simply the Pagel Cemetery.
The cemetery has been inventoried several times. E. F. Smith of Gonzales County inventoried the cemetery some time between 1948 and 1967. (Phoebe Miller's 1967 death date was not included in his list.) Sammy Tise's inventory referred to the two parts of the cemetery as the Meyer and Bonorden Cemeteries in Lavaca County, Texas Cemeteries, which he published in 1983. He inventoried the cemetery in 1980 and the road between the two cemeteries was still gravel at that time. At some point between Smith's and Tise's inventories, two of the Bonordens were exhumed and reinterred at the Hallettsville City Cemetery. Six other Bonorden markers were also removed and taken to the City Cemetery, though the actual graves remain inside a chain link fence east of the road. The Beyer marker was also moved at that time and the location of that grave is unknown, though it may have been inside the same enclosure.
Please contact Rox Ann Johnson if you are descended from any of the following or can provide additional information.
