Crown Hill Cemetery

Pasadena was founded in 1893 by John H. Burnett of Galveston, who named it for Pasadena, California, because of its lush growth. The La Porte, Houston and Northern Railroad came through in 1894 and opened it to farming, and the retired Kansas banker Charles R. Munger and the land promoter Cora Bacon Foster helped organize the community. After the 1900 hurricane Clara Barton of the American Red Cross bought a million and a half strawberry plants for Gulf Coast farmers, and Pasadena became the region's strawberry capital. Residents formed the first independent school system in Harris County in 1899.

What the plaque says

Crown Hill Cemetery Permanent settlement of this area began about 1891. Lot sales in the new town of Pasadena began in 1893, and the town was officially platted three years later. The first recorded burials in this vicinity occurred about 1894, although the exact locations of the graves are unknown. This graveyard, originally known as Pasadena Cemetery and the town's only community burial ground, was established in 1906 on a knoll overlooking Vince's Bayou and Buffalo Bayou. The first person buried here was E. P. Pomeroy, who died on October 24, 1906. Those interred here include many of Pasadena's early settlers and community leaders, and veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II. The graveyard became known as Crown Hill Cemetery following World War I, possibly as a result of its proximity to the Crown Central Refinery. It has also been referred to as the Mexican Cemetery due to the numbers of Mexican-American farmers who were interred here beginning in the 1920s. Although surrounded by 20th-century industrial development, this cemetery survives as a link to the area's pioneer heritage. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 8.6 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Emancipation Park — 8.8 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 9.5 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 9.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Allen Ranch — 0.6 mi
• City of Pasadena — 0.9 mi
• Near Site of Isaac Batterson Home — 1.5 mi
• Glendale Cemetery — 3.3 mi