Harrisburg-Jackson Cemetery

Since the last burial in 1967, keeping the graves has fallen to volunteers. The cemetery was long written off as lost, and a county historical commissioner said no one was legally responsible for it. A Milby High School student organized a cleanup in 1988. Neighbor Ruben Muñoz mowed with his own riding mower and put up a fence, but the weeds came back after his death, and Hurricane Rita toppled nearly every tree in 2005. Woody Jones's Project RESPECT later planted 88 trees. In June 2023 more than 75 church volunteers joined the lone groundskeeper, Dr. Donald Williams.

What the plaque says

Harrisburg-Jackson Cemetery The earliest origins of this cemetery are undocumented. African American burials likely began with development of the local cattle industry and area railroads during the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1870s an African American community was well established in Harrisburg. About that time, former slaves began to establish their own fraternal organizations. The Mutual Benevolent Association was chartered in 1878. As a service to its members, the association arranged and sometimes financed burial services on this site, located between Harrisburg and what apparently was a proposed freedman's town which never materialized. Ownership of the land changed several times in the ensuing years, and a benevolent organization called Loving Band of Hope acquired the property in 1899, caring for the cemetery for 23 years. In 1922, the Jackson Funeral Home, among the oldest African American funeral homes in Houston, bought the cemetery property and used it as its primary burial ground until the last recorded burial in 1967. Among the graves is that of Tom Blue, once a body servant of Sam Houston. Blue reported that he was present at the Battle of San Jacinto. He served Houston until escaping to Mexico before the Emancipation Proclamation and later returned to live out his long life in Harrisburg. Also buried here are Steve Ray, a rodeo rider and cowboy on the Samuel Allen Ranch in Pasadena; black civic leader George W. Sanders; Wilson Burley, who fought in the Civil War in the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry; Austin C. Winfree, a buffalo soldier who served in Cuba during the Spanish American War; and veterans of World War I. The cemetery is a chronicle of the African American slaves, former slaves and pioneers of Harrisburg and of Texas. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 5.2 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 — 5.9 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 — 6.2 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 — 6.5 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

• Old Harrisburg — 0.3 mi
• Holy Cross Mission (Episcopal) — 0.4 mi
• Glendale Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Home of Gen. Sidney Sherman — 0.5 mi