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.
If Victoria’s nearly 200-year history was written into a high school textbook, Evergreen Cemetery could be a review for the final exam.
The cemetery was the first community cemetery in Victoria and dates back to 1850, Doris Gilpatrick and Becky Roell wrote in “The History and Heritage of Victoria County,” on hand at the Victoria Regional History Center.
Located at the corner of Vine and Red River streets, the cemetery holds the gravesites of many of Victoria’s most famous inhabitants and storied individuals, as well as hundreds of lesser-known citizens.
Fifteen historic markers dot the landscape, including one at the entrance to the grounds that reads, “In 1849 John McCrabb bought 27 acres of a tract of land granted to the city by the Republic of Texas. The property already contained the gravesite of Dr. Walter Fosgate, who died in 1848. During the 1850s, part of McCrabb’s land became the new public cemetery.”
On the quiet fields, beneath stretching oak trees, rest the gravesites of Juan Linn and Victor Marion Rose, as well as of William Sutton and Gabriel Slaughter.
A wrought-iron fence encloses the Historical Grave Shrine of the De Leon Family in the oldest portion of the cemetery.
While it is not known for certain that Martin De Leon, the city’s founder, is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, the shrine holds some of the members of his family.
Empresario Don Martin De Leon founded Victoria in 1824, but in the decades prior to establishing the colony, he owned two other ranches in South Texas, then a part of New Spain.
The first was on the Nueces River and was called Rancho Santa Margarita. De Leon received land after serving in the military for 10 years, Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm wrote in “De Leon, A Tejano Family History.
He had risen through the ranks to achieve a captaincy and received land as a reward, close to the year 1810.
“As part of acquiring the land, Martin carried out the formal act of possession. Accompanied by the government official granting the land, Martin was taken by the hand and ‘pulled weeds and herbs from the earth in the name of his majesty the king and knelt in prayer giving thanks to God and the king,” Crimm wrote.
De Leon captured and tamed wild Mustangs on his ranch and raised cattle. Oftentimes, people traveling through would obtain horses from De Leon to ride for the remainder of their journey.
Noah Smithwick, Crimm wrote, was one such journeyman and left an account of De Leon and of Rancho Santa Margarita’s horse wrangling.
“Senor De Leon was the very essence of hospitality, as, indeed, I found the Mexicans everywhere to be,” Smithwick wrote.
But seeing how the Mustangs “reared and snorted,” Smithwick and his companions “concluded walking would be a pleasant pastime compared to riding such steeds, so we continued our journey on foot.”
More than a decade later, De Leon founded Victoria after receiving a colonization grant. Six De Leon family members have markers within the family shrine at Evergreen Cemetery. Each would have spent time on that first ranch, some as youngsters.
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