Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
Hundreds of bodies are buried beneath a square field on the corner of Commercial and Wheeler streets in Victoria, but not one headstone marks a gravesite.
When Victoria was founded, the parcel of land, then at the outside edge of town, was designated as a public burial ground. At the time, however, most residents interred their dead in home plots.
Still, at least 200 pioneers and soldiers, many victims of disease and some of execution, are buried beneath Memorial Square.
A historic marker at the site reads “Once the oldest public burial ground in Victoria. This square was laid out in 1824 when Martin De Leon founded the town then located in the Mexican state of ‘Coahuila and Texas.’”
Home burials were deemed a health hazard and outlawed in 1846 and so the cemetery populace grew. It was designated Memorial Square in 1899.
In November 1946, a Victoria County notary public, F.C. Proctor Jr., took a sworn statement from Kate Stoner O’Connor, containing a wealth of information about the gravesites. The document is on hand at the history center.
O’Connor noted in the statement she heard her late mother, G. O. Stoner, “tell that many early Victorians were buried in the ‘Old Graveyard’ now called Memorial Square; and that after this cemetery was closed and Evergreen Cemetery opened, the families could not have their dead re-interred.”
She said the reason they could not be moved was because they could not be found for certain.
“Headstones or markers of the graves had been knocked down and broken up by the negro soldiers of the United States Army of Occupation who were quartered there in 1865 and 1866,” O‘Connor stated, “and all traces of the graves were obliterated by these vandals.”
A search of documents at the history center, however, gives a fair account of who rests under Memorial Square.
First, four of Colonel William Ward’s men who were executed by Mexican troops are known to lie beneath the ground in the square.
Ward’s Georgia Battalion was stationed with Colonel Fannin at Goliad before Fannin’s men were massacred by General Jose Urrea’s troops after the Battle of Coleto, March 19 and 20, 1836.
The battalion was sent on a raid to Refugio and was later expecting to meet Fannin and his troops in Victoria.
“Ward knew that Fannin had planned to retreat northward to Victoria and sought to rendezvous with him there,” Stephen L. Hardin wrote in “Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution,” “By the time they reached the settlement on March 21, however, Urrea already held the town. A number of Ward’s men were captured or killed trying to enter town.”
Those captured were executed on orders from General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
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