City Cemetery

The cemetery's Catholic half, conveyed to the bishop in 1892, became the resting place of much of Laredo's leadership. According to the Handbook of Texas, Bishop Peter Verdaguer and Mayor Samuel Jarvis are buried in the Laredo Catholic Cemetery. Cristóbal Benavides was moved there from the old Laredo cemetery in the late 1930s, and his half-brother Refugio was reinterred in the Herrera family plot during World War II. Santos Benavides lies in Calvary Catholic Cemetery, by his own marker's account.

What the plaque says

City Cemetery The earliest burial grounds in Laredo were known as camposantos (Saints' Fields) by Spanish settlers. Laredo's first camposanto was probably the one at San Agustín Church. In 1892 the Laredo City Council decreed that the cemeteries then in use were full. The city dedicated four blocks for a burial ground, and half was conveyed to the local bishop for use of the Catholic church. The original plan included a Jewish section and a potters field for indigent citizens. Large private plots were set aside for local church groups, such as the Ladies' Guild of Christ Episcopal Church, and for fraternal, civic and labor organizations including Mutualistas, Mexican American benevolent groups essential to the Mexican labor movement in the United States. A deadly smallpox epidemic in 1898-1899 caused the daily burials of small children and the closure of public places such as churches and schools. In 1926, bodies from an earlier city cemetery on Scott Street were reinterred here and at the Catholic Calvary Cemetery. By the 1930s, an African American section and an infants section had been added. Through the 1950s Laredo citizens honored the Mexican custom of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), also known as All Souls' Day, with the eating and offering of food and cemetery decoration. A veterans section was added in 1974. The cemetery continued to grow throughout the 20th century. Grave decoration and funerary art reflect Mexican American traditions. The lack of formal shrubbery and landscaping is offset by highly elaborate floral displays. The Laredo City Cemetery is a chronicle of the city's ethnic and religious diversity. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Casa Blanca International State Park — 1.9 mi
  A 1,680-acre reservoir on Chacón Creek at Laredo's eastern edge, a city lake run as a state park since 1991, with bass fishing, camping and a long human history.
• San Agustín Cathedral — 2.3 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• San Agustín Plaza — 2.4 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 2.4 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.

More markers nearby

• Refugio Benavides — steps away
• Bishop Peter Verdaguer — steps away
• Santos Benavides — steps away
• Raymond and Tirza Martin High School — 1.7 mi