Round Rock Cemetery (Sam Bass grave)

The story

Texas Rangers shot 27-year-old train robber Sam Bass in downtown Round Rock on July 19, 1878. He bled out two days later—on his birthday—and was buried right here off what is now Sam Bass Road. But dying didn't give him much peace. For decades, souvenir hunters armed with hammers and chisels slowly hacked his original sandstone marker down to a nubbin. City officials eventually had to intervene, removing the surviving rock scraps to the Round Rock Public Library for safe keeping and dropping a fresh stone over his grave.

Look past the outlaw mythos, though, and the cemetery reveals a much darker, multi-layered record of early Texas. A half-acre patch bounded by old cedar posts marks the historic slave burial ground, situated next to the late 19th-century Hopewell Colored Cemetery. Nearby, you'll find the grave of Angeline Scott, an eleven-year-old child whose 1851 headstone remains the oldest legible marker in the entire graveyard, back when the grounds went by Old Town or Presbyterian Cemetery.

The cemetery's strangest plot belongs to Vander Clyde, better known as Barbette. Born in Round Rock, Clyde escaped north to become an international trapeze sensation in 1920s Paris. Dressed in full drag—beaded gowns, ostrich feathers, and high wigs—Barbette astounded surrealist icons like Jean Cocteau before ripping off the wig at the grand finale to expose the illusion. Decades after defying gravity across Europe, the aerialist lies buried in the same quiet Texas dirt as nineteenth-century lawmen and highwaymen.