Banquete Cemetery

The marker passes quickly over the one resident everyone asks about. Sally Scull, born Sarah Jane Newman, made Banquete her base in 1852. County records follow her: a brand recorded in October 1853, thirty-three horses and fourteen cattle on the tax rolls by 1854, and 150 acres bought on Banquete Creek in 1855. In the war she hauled cotton to Mexico with Mexican vaqueros as her teamsters. A jury acquitted her of perjury in May 1866. Within two years the records treat her as gone, and how she died remains unknown.

What the plaque says

Banquete Cemetery In June 1832 the colony of Irish families settled along the Nueces River by John McMullen and James McGloin was linked to Mexico by completion of the Matamoros Road. Mexican officials sponsored a Fiesta near this site as a goodwill gesture to the colonists. The village that later grew up here was called "Banquete", the Mexican name for the 4-day celebration. Banquete was settled before the civil war (1861-65) as a stock raising and horse trading center. During the war, it was an important stop on the trade route to Mexico. Oldest marked grave in Banquete Cemetery (1 mile east) is that of Joseph P. Madray (b. 1840), a local rancher who was serving in the confederate army when he died of typhoid fever, June 2, 1863. Also buried here are other confederate soldiers and prominent Banquete residents, including members of the Bennett, Elliff, Saunders, and Wright families. By tradition, the cemetery property was once the site of stockpens belonging to Sally Scull, notorious horse trader and cotton freighter of the civil war period. Pioneer rancher B.A. Bennett (b. 1824) deeded one acre for the community burial ground in 1910. In the 1950's, another acre was added to the cemetery, which contains about 200 marked graves. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 11 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 18 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 21 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 24 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.

More markers nearby

• Banquete, C.S.A. — 0.8 mi
• Casa Blanca Land Grant — 6.1 mi
• Nicholas Bluntzer — 6.8 mi
• Stout Jackson & The Carpa Theaters — 7.1 mi