Historical Marker
El Carmen Cemetery (Cementerio del Carmen)
San Antonio, Bexar County · Texas
Erected 1994
Gustave Toudouze, buried here, built a museum in the brush. Born in Noyent, France, in 1819, he taught natural history before emigrating to Tennessee in 1846, and in 1853 moved to Losoya, where as a taxidermist he gathered birds, eggs, animals, flowers and rocks. With his friend Henry P. Attwater he showed a large collection of Texas mammals and birds at the New Orleans exposition of 1884-85. The Medina battle the cemetery recalls was, by the Handbook's account, the bloodiest ever fought on Texas soil, and Lt. Antonio López de Santa Anna served with the victors.
What the plaque says
El Carmen Cemetery (Cementerio del Carmen) Numerous 19th-century journals and other written historical accounts trace the origin of this cemetery to the burial of casualities of the Battle of Medina. Fought on August 18, 1813, the battle was the result of a failed attempt by a Republican Army of the North, consisting of about 1200 to 1500 Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, to free Mexico from Royalist Spanish Rule. The Royalist army was victorious, and hundreds of men who died on the battlefield later were interred at this site between 1813 and 1817. The church of Nuestra Senora del Carmen traces its origin to a chapel built over the soldiers' burial crypt. The burial site became a community cemetery as pioneer settlers established homes in this area. Among those interred in the graveyard are the families of Domingo Losoya and Dionicio Martinez, who received Mexican land grants surrounding the cemetery property. Also buried here are Enrique Esparza, who as a child survived the Battle of the Alamo, and French immigrant Gustave Toudouze, a prominent local naturalist and businessman. A cemetery association formed in 1927 maintains the historic site, which continues in use as a cemetery for the local community. (1994)
Where it stands
29.23998, -98.46678 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 5.5 miThe southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
- Mission San Juan — 6.5 miThe mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.
- San Antonio Missions National Historical Park — 8.4 miFour working parish churches on the Mission Trail south of downtown, with the visitor center at Mission San Jose, the Queen of the Missions, and the descendants who still worship there.
- Mission Concepción — 11 miA stone church dedicated in 1755 that has never fallen into ruin, its convento ceilings still painted, and the ground where the Texas Revolution's fight for San Antonio began.