Leander H. McNelly is buried in a five acre Baptist burying ground off a farm road in Washington County, under a monument raised by public subscription among the citizens of South Texas. He was thirty three when he died of tuberculosis on the fourth of September 1877, and almost everything he is remembered for happened in the previous three years. Born in 1844 in what is now West Virginia, he came to Texas young, rode as a private in Company F of the Fifth Texas Cavalry in Sibley's New Mexico campaign, fought at Galveston in 1863, and was made a captain of scouts. He served as a captain in the Texas State Police from July 1870 until the force was disbanded in April 1873, and in 1874 the governor commissioned him to raise a company called the Washington County Volunteers, named for this county. In April 1875 he recruited forty one men in two days and took them to the Nueces Strip, financed by cattle ranchers, to deal with cross border cattle theft. On the twentieth of November that year he crossed into Mexico without authorisation to recover stolen stock, and charged the wrong stockade. It cost him his command. He stayed on unofficially through the Sutton and Taylor trials that October, and his muster roll records an official discharge in February 1877. He was dead seven months later. Mount Zion Cemetery sits on a league granted to Robert Clokey of Austin's Second Colony in 1831, holds a hundred and thirty two marked graves representing fifty five families, and is also known as Hall Cemetery and as the Old Baptist Cemetery. Sources disagree about where McNelly died. They agree about where he lies.
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30.2137, -96.5770
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