Near-full cemetery offers up colorful history
A home for seniors once stood on the site of nearly-full historic graveyard for paupers
A month before Harris County lays the final person to rest in its paupers’ cemetery, longforgotten details about the graveyard have re-emerged.
Sandwiched between noisy industrial lots, where oil derricks are assembled and colorful steel shipping containers are stacked so high they peek out above the treetops, the perimeter of the 18-acre Harris County paupers’ cemetery is lined with a gleaming, black iron fence. Giant pink and white oleander bushes and crape myrtles planted by Boy Scouts seeking their Eagle ranks flank the narrow driveway.
For more than 90 years, Harris County has buried the poor — often unclaimed and sometimes unknown— in this burial ground on Oates Road, just down the street from the city landfill.
“It’s not an ideal location,” said Bill Hall, the cemetery’s caretaker for about a decade. “But it’s what was here.” Not entirely. A month before the county lays its final paupers to rest at the historic cemetery, long-forgotten details about its past have reemerged, showing the plot once
was part of a larger operation that was, by all accounts, full of life.
Nearly 60 years ago, the burial site was just one component of a 100-acre property the county purchased in 1921 with $80,000 it recovered in court from corrupt law enforcement officers. There, it built a massive, two-story stucco house for white, indigent senior citizens — wards of the county who had no moneyand often no family, but were able to bathe in heated running water, eat fresh produce grown onsite, fish in Greens Bayou and enjoy regular visits from cheerful church ladies and glee clubs.
County’s poor farm
Details of the “Harris County Home For the Aged” were revealed in a crumbling scrapbook delivered a few months ago to County Archivist Sarah Jackson, filled with 1920sera newspaper clippings, black and white photographs, letters and holiday cards sent to the home’s superintendent.
“I knew there had been an old folks’ home out there becausewe hadsome pictures from our auditor’s photographs, but I didn’t know very much about it,” Jackson said.
Other local historians and preservation officials said they had no idea the cemetery once was part of a larger operation.
Jackson’s research shows it was the final incarnation of the “poor farm” the county operated at the turn of the century, where paupers and prisoners lived and worked the land.
When it opened in 1922, the Home for the Aged was hailed as a pastoral estate where up to 100 white and black senior citizens hard on their luck could comfortably live out their final years.
The first line of a newspaper article in the scrapbook detailing the new facility read: “A real comfortable home, surrounded by many acres of ground, shaded by sturdy trees, cooled by summer breezes and warmed by steam heat, located near a stream farmed for its fish, fern banks and spreading trees and a garden with chickens and cows is the dream of everyman and woman.”
The superintendent, T.W. Harrel, “has a heart as big as the world,” the article declared. By the mid1920s, Harrel petitioned Commissioners Court for more space because there was awaiting list to get into the home, Jackson said.
‘Foxy grandpa’
The scrapbook landed on Wallace Saage’s desk in 2008, brought in by an elderly woman who had found it while cleaning out her attic.
“She just found it and had no connection with it,” said Saage, the collections curator at The Heritage Society at Sam Houston Park. “It’s a wonderful little piece of history.”
Jackson said the scrapbook has helped fill in many holes in the known history of the property, including its various facilities and the characters who called it home.
A series of articles from the old Houston Press titled “Over the Hills to the Poorhouse” featured residents — or “inmates,” as they were called — like Jack Bear “Foxy Grandpa,” age 78.
“He is a ‘devil with the women’ and holds hands with women inmates,” the article said. “There has been some fear that he might elope.”
Segregated housing
A Dec. 22, 1924, letter in the collection addressed to Harrel from the director of the Southern Pacific Glee Club apologizes for a canceled Christmas visit and details a gift en route: “one box of apples, one box of oranges, two cartons of Prince Albert tobacco and two boxes of candy.”
Photos in the scrapbook show that black residents lived in a wood-frame house a few hundred feet away from the main house until 1930, when the county built them their own stucco abode with big, arched windows.
Every year, local churches hosted Thanksgiving dinners, described in the papers as joyful events with plenty of food and music.
It was a stark improvement from the 1880s-era poor farm the county had operated on a 200-acre property in present day West University Place, Jackson said. The county eventually sold that property to developers in 1923.
Closed in 1958
In March 1922, 75 poor farm residents we removed to the home, then located on Crosby Road. Bodies buried at a cemetery there were transferred, too, and dumped in a common grave at the new property, according to “At Rest: A Historical Directory of Harris County, Texas, Cemeteries (1822-2001).”
“At the time I did the original book I do not remember that it was part of any larger acreage,” said author Trevia Beverly.
It is unclear whether residents of the Home for the Aged who died there were buried in the paupers’ cemetery or a separate one on-site, Jackson said.
The population of the home hovered at capacity through the Great Depression until after World War II, when Social Security and other federal programs diminished the need.
Only about 50 residents lived at the home in the decade leading up to August 1958, when commissioners finally ordered it closed.
The property was sold two years later, except for the paupers’ cemetery, which now is nearing its final chapter.
With more than 15,400 remains, the site is nearly at capacity.
The county will begin burying paupers at a new cemetery 21 miles away in Crosby that is expected to last for 125 years.