Humble, DAR work to restore old cemetery
New contract for improvements is latest chapter in long history of city’s oldest cemetery, a final resting place for Texas pioneers
HUMBLE — Following decades of stop-and-start preservation efforts, the city of Humble and the James Tull Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution will restore the Civil War-era Old Humble Cemetery, final resting place of some of the area’s early pioneers and most prominent citizens.
The Humble City Council earlier this month approved a contract of about $10,000 with Texas Cemetery Restoration “to provide for the restoration, repair and leveling of monuments,” at the historic graveyard at the corner of Isaack Road and Old Humble Road, in the heart of the historic city.
The contract represents the latest chapter in the long history of the oldest cemetery in the city, a history marked by alternating periods of preservation and neglect, said Robert Meaux, president of the Humble Museum and town historian.
“It alternates between these periods when the community would come in and clean it up, then it would get run down, then they would clean it up again and it would get run down again,” said Meaux.
The city assumed full legal ownership of the graveyard in February 2020, which allowed city officials to initiate more permanent improvements.
“Prior to that, the cemetery was in a legal ‘limbo’ so to speak as it was still technically owned by the Humble Cemetery Company, which had been defunct for several decades,” City Manager Jason Stuebe said in an email statement.
Going forward the city anticipates spending about $10,000 annually on cemetery improvements.
The city has removed a number of the rusted-out and hazardous chain-link fences that families had erected around some of the gravesites, Meaux said.
To increase visitor access, the city has also laid gravel along the main walkway and built a gravel parking lot in the back of the cemetery.
The DAR’s involvement with preserving the cemetery dates back three decades, when it began working to designate the site with a Texas Historical Marker. Volunteers provided research to the Harris County Historical Commission, which awarded the historic marker in 1992.
Working in conjunction with the city, the DAR launched a historic preservation project in 2017 to clean, repair and reset the headstones, which have suffered from years of environmental damage, said Connie Grubbs, historian and past regent of the James Tull Chapter.
“Half of the headstones are not done. We’re barely getting started,” she said.
The Humble Cemetery is the final resting place of many of the area’s most well-known early settlers. Among those believed to be interred there are Joseph Dunman, one of the famous Alamo Riders, dispatched to Texas towns from the Alamo by William Barret Travis to plead for reinforcements, before the fall of the famous fortress.
After the Texas Revolution, the newly formed Republic of Texas awarded Dunman a land grant in the area of present-day Humble. The Dunman family established the current Humble Cemetery as their family graveyard, although it is not known whether Joseph himself is buried there, according to a cemetery history by Meaux and Margaret Johnson Byron, a director of the Humble Museum.
One noteworthy person who is known to be interred at the cemetery is Jane Elizabeth Humble, wife of Pleasant Humble, who established the Humble Post Office and for whom the modern city is named.
Others buried in the cemetery include a wide range of colorful characters including merchants, blacksmiths and roughnecks, illustrating the city’s past as a frontier town and later an oilfield boom town at the turn of the 20th century.
The cemetery also serves as the final resting place veterans who served from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.
Meaux said the number of people buried in the cemetery began to diminish in the late 1920s with the opening of perpetual-care cemeteries in the area.
Less frequent burials at the cemetery continued through the early 1970s. Meaux estimated that there are still between 300 and 400 people interred in the cemetery although it is impossible to determine an exact number, because not all of the graves are marked.