Glendale Cemetery

Birdsall had been a New York circuit judge, appointed by Governor DeWitt Clinton, and a New York state senator in 1832 and 1833 before moving to Texas in 1837. Sam Houston named him attorney general on August 15, 1837, and the Senate confirmed him unanimously. Houston then made him chief justice pro tempore after James Collinsworth, but the Senate refused to confirm him. From January 8, 1839, he was Houston's law partner, and he was a charter member of the Philosophical Society of Texas. He died of yellow fever on July 22, 1839.

What the plaque says

Glendale Cemetery Burial place, Texas heroes and pioneers. Began as private plot of family of John R. Harris, founder of Harrisburg (now part of Houston). First burial, on July 23, 1839, was of Mrs. Harris' cousin, Judge John Birdsall, an ex-attorney general of texas. A cemetery developed without management or legal status. In 1897, local ladies formed Glen Dale Cemetery Company and kept grounds in order for years. After a period of neglect, a group began restoration in 1952. Glendale Cemetery Association, Inc., now manages the property and provides perpetual care. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 5.5 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 6.3 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 6.4 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 6.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad — 0.3 mi
• Old Harrisburg — 0.3 mi
• Lorenzo de Zavala — 1.5 mi
• Near Site of Isaac Batterson Home — 2.2 mi