By and By in Baby Head

Near the former town of Baby Head

In our research for this short road trip, Dave ran found Baby Head Mountain on Google Maps. Being the curious person that he is, he had to see what had been written about the area. He was a bit appalled to find that the information about Baby Head was just as grizzly as the name implied. And after what he’d read, Baby Head became a destination rather than an aside to our road trip.



Baby Head is all but a ghost town in Llano County; there is a little convenience store close to where the town was. Supposedly there also is

Baby Head Cemetery

a marker commemorating the town, but we didn’t find it. However, we did find both Baby Head Cemetery and Babyhead Mountain which are located near Texas State Highway 16 just north of Llano. Babyhead Mountain is only about 250 feet tall, so I don’t know that I’d actually call it a mountain.

Just where did the name ‘Baby Head’ or ‘Babyhead’ come from? As with

Cemetery Art

a lot of things in history, it depends on who you ask. One historian says that it originated in about 1873, citing her husband, Sidney Elliot, who lived in the area at the time. Another historian puts the date at about 1850. However, the story of how the area got its name remains the same. Local oral tradition says that the name originated from a small child being killed by the Indian raiders who left its remains on the mountain. According to Elliot, the actual name of the child was Mary Elizabeth Buster; her father was Bill Buster.

Old Marker

Baby Head Cemetery is the only remnant of a community that once had a post office, a school, a courthouse, homes, farms, and businesses; not being on a railroad route was probably one of the reasons that the town vanished. It’s interesting to me that neither Mary Elizabeth nor her father, Bill Buster are a part of this cemetery. The oldest documented grave here is that of another child, Jodie May McKneely. As with many early cemeteries, a lot of the graves belong to children who could not survive the early days of Texas.

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