Bringing back forgotten cemetery
Remains at N.E. Side site were moved
Beads of sweat dotted Daniel Winters’ cleanshaven head as he walked through an overgrown corner of the Northeast Side, seeking the former graves of his ancestors.
He squinted in the glare of the morning sun as his niece Melanie Winters Brooks and landscape architect Everett Fly followed him.
“My uncle and grandfather were in this area,” the 85-year-old retired electrical technician said, pointing beneath a grove of trees. “Cousin Bessie was over there.”
Wading through kneehigh grass and thorn brush, he gestured to a wooden stake tied with a strip of pink cloth jutting from a spot he said was the burial place of his
great-grandfather Amos Jackson, a former Buffalo Soldier. Winters hopes to mark other former gravesites in the coming months.
It’s a labor of love mixed with anger and despair.
The marked graves that were once here were summarily moved in 1986, without any notice to family members, and put into a single mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, about a mile away. No knows exactly why the remains were removed, but presumably this was to make way for development that never occurred.
The disinterment was discovered by Winters and his brothers when they arrived at the cemetery near Nacogdoches Road and Loop 1604 in the late 1980s. After that, the family was at odds over how to rectify the issue until Fly contacted them two years ago for help with another burial site.
African-American cemeteries were one of the anchors of rural settlements in San Antonio and across the South. They were popular gathering spots for families — not just for funerals but to maintain the grounds. The expansive green areas with giant shade trees also were places for major celebrations, including Juneteenth — commemorating June 19, 1865, the day that Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to announce that slavery had ended.
Winters recalls that when he returned to San Antonio after serving with the Army in the Korean War, a relative would nudge him and say, “Let’s go work some graves.” With shovels and picks, they began a tradition of clearing away weeds in the shade of gnarled mesquite and oak trees where ancestors were buried.
Decades before heavy machinery carved away Anderson Road to build Loop 1604, grave markers at the neatly maintained cemetery were often dotted with fresh flowers. In the cemetery’s heyday, a funeral would see churchgoers in their Sunday finery, walking behind a horse-drawn carriage bearing the casket to the burial ground. It was a communitywide event. Today, spent shotgun shells and sun-bleached bones of longdead critters litter what was once the Winters-Jackson Family Cemetery.
“This is the first time that I’m able to stand on this sacred ground,” Brooks said of the cemetery she’d only heard about in stories. “When you have this, it affirms that we had life here. There was just a tenacity of the people. They didn’t give up.”
The Winters family can recall stories of their ancestors celebrating the holiday and the promise of progress awaiting future generations that included Daniel Winters, the patriarch of the Winters family affectionally known as “Uncle Dan.” He’s the last living link to a rich heritage and forgotten cemetery that Fly is hoping to rededicate.
“It really angers me,” Winters said, standing in the parched grass where headstones and markers once lay. “I feel violated, as if someone broke into your house.”
A year ago, Fly enlisted the help of the archaeological team at the University of Texas at San Antonio, city archaeologist Kay Hindes, Austin architect Ellen Hunt and other historians to determine the perimeter and extent of the former cemetery. In April, a search by Fly and the archaeologists yielded three bone fragments, personal items and coffin hardware.
The cemetery is one of several once owned by black settlers on the Northeast Side and outer parts of Bexar County. The post-Civil War settlements were a sign of the times, when African-Americans pooled their resources to purchase land and build independent communities that included their own cemeteries.
Fly, a San Antonio native, was a graduate student at Harvard when he began his four decades of historical research. He has uncovered histories of more than 1,200 African-American and Native American historic settlements across the nation. For his work, Fly received the 2014 National Humanities Medal.
According to Fly’s research, Morton Southwest owned the land in 1986, when the remains were disinterred and reburied at Holy Cross Cemetery. The owners of that development company are long gone, and it’s unclear why the disinterment happened.
“If we hadn’t had Dan’s recollection, we’d be without an explanation,” Fly said. “As far as state law is concerned, this is still a cemetery.”
Midland-based Fasken Oil and Ranch Ltd., which now owns the land, has been helpful in uncovering more details about the site, Fly said.
The Kronkosky Foundation funded the April project. Texas Nursery and Landscape donated a backhoe and operator. Fly joined Paul Shawn Marceaux, director of UTSA’s Center for Archaeological Research, the project archaeologist; Sarah Wigley, project manager; and lab/field technicians Jason Perez and Megan Brown to examine the property.
“This is a great example of a forgotten story of a small family cemetery, connected to the African-American community in San Antonio, which is not always represented as much as it should be,” Marceaux said. “I find it incredibly fulfilling and an honor to be a part of that.”
Fly said personal research is essential to safeguarding history.
“You simply can’t depend on what’s already in the history books or what the popular theory is about San Antonio history,” Fly said. “This would’ve been an opportunity for the 300th year (celebration) to set a course for more people to do this kind of research, connect these kind of dots and enrich our history and culture.”
After the visit to the cemetery, Fly, Winters and Brooks gathered at Holy Cross at the stone slab that marks where the remains of the 72 people disinterred are located. Fly said representatives for the current landowner were told by cemetery officials that the remains weren’t buried more than three deep. But no graves are marked individually, and remains were buried along with headstones, the officials said.
“When you start stacking, to me that’s a mass grave,” Fly said.
As Winters stood over the marker, he read the inscription that ends with words from the Book of Wisdom: “And the souls of the just are in the hand of God.”
He thought of how the desecration of his family’s cemetery ran counter to the rest of the Scripture, not inscribed on the marker: “And no torment shall touch them.”
“This is a great example of a forgotten story of a small family cemetery.” Paul Shawn Marceaux, director of UTSA’s Center for Archaeological Research