Houston Cemetery Company

The company's park-like plan came from a hired designer, and its early decades were rougher than the plaque lets on. English horticulturalist Alfred Whitaker laid out the grounds after Mount Auburn in Cambridge and Brooklyn's Greenwood. The edge-of-town glen drew gamblers, duelists and robbers. In 1893 New York speculator Thomas Tinsley took control and looted the company until lot owners ejected him in 1896. The nonprofit that followed ended his refusal to bury people of African descent. Since 1999 Glenwood has also run the adjoining Washington Cemetery, the 1887 German Society Cemetery renamed in 1918.

What the plaque says

Houston Cemetery Company The Houston Cemetery Company was one of several chartered and private associations promoted by Houston business leaders for the purpose of effecting civic, cultural and economic improvements following the Civil War. Houston Cemetery Company was chartered as a private cemetery company by the state of Texas on May 12, 1871, and the company set out to establish a rural cemetery with beauty and integrity. Several names for the new cemetery were considered, but stockholders and directors finally chose by ballot the name "Glenwood." The first burial at Glenwood cCmetery occurred on june 19, 1872. Glenwood Cemetery is an early Texas example of the country cemetery plan first used in the eastern and northern United States in the 1830s. Directors selected property situated between Buffalo Bayou and Washington Avenue interspersed with springs and gullies to achieve the desired pastoral setting. The intended park-like landscape design is reflected in the rambling walks and drives that follow the curvilinear sections situated around a wooded glen and a bridge over a spring-fed gully. The beautiful setting drew Houstonians to Glenwood Cemetery as a place of relaxation and recreation prior to the 1899 establishment of Houston's first public park, Sam Houston park. The Houston Cemetery Company reorganized as the Glenwood Cemetery Association in 1904, and the Association was succeeded by Glenwood Cemetery, Inc., in 1969. The Glenwood Cemetery Historic Preservation foundation was formed in 1999 to preserve the historic heritage of the monuments and grounds of this important Houston landmark. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.0 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.2 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 2.3 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Caspar Braun — steps away
• James Robert Cade — steps away
• Eugene Thomas Heiner — steps away
• Belle Sherman Kendall — steps away