Confederate Cemetery

One of the men buried here carried a killing with him for the rest of his life. George Wythe Baylor, born at Fort Gibson in the Cherokee Nation in 1832, served as an aide to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston and fought at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. On April 6, 1865, in Galveston, he quarreled with fellow officer John Austin Wharton, who slapped him; Baylor shot the unarmed Wharton dead and later called it a "lifelong sorrow." In 1879 he left San Antonio for Ysleta to command a Texas Ranger company, his wagons carrying a piano and a game cock.

What the plaque says

Confederate Cemetery This cemetery is located within part of a 40-acre grant of land given to the city of San Antonio by the King of Spain. The property was later subdivided into twenty-nine separate cemeteries by City Aldermen, and this area was designated as City Cemetery Number Four. This section became known as the Confederate Cemetery after its purchase in 1885 by the Albert Sidney Johnston Camp No. 1, United Confederate Veterans. The earliest documented burial in this plot, that of Charles Hutcheson, dates to 1855 and was already in place at the time of the Camp's purchase. Prominent Confederate veterans interred here include John Salmon "Rip" Ford, the pioneer Texas political leader and newspaper editor famous for his service as a Texas Ranger; George Wythe Baylor, a political and military leader; and Hamilton P. Bee, Confederate General and Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. There are over 900 marked burials in the Confederate Cemetery, including those of Civil War veterans, their dependents, and later generations of descendants. Also interred here are veterans of World War I and World War II. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Alamo — 1.4 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.
• La Villita Historic Arts Village — 1.4 mi
  The little village across the river from the presidio, where Cos surrendered San Antonio in 1835, rebuilt by Depression-era youth crews as a working crafts village.
• San Antonio River Walk — 1.5 mi
  A Depression-era park one level below downtown, built because San Antonio refused to pave its river after the 1921 flood, and designed by an architect the project later fired.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 1.8 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.

More markers nearby

• Hamilton P. Bee — steps away
• John Salmon "Rip" Ford — steps away
• Samuel S. Smith — steps away
• Charles Frederick King — steps away