Matagorda Cemetery

The plaque mentions the 1862 yellow fever. The city council's own count is stark: 45 deaths among about 150 white residents between late September and November 27. Albert Wadsworth, a blockade runner, believed his trade had brought the fever, and he died of it on November 4. About fifty enslaved people lived in town. The council minutes record none dying there, while a later article says enslaved people died elsewhere in the county, unnamed. Many victims were buried here, but a 2014 radar survey did not confirm a mass grave.

What the plaque says

Matagorda Cemetery One of earliest cemeteries in Texas. Founded soon after town was settled, about 1829, as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony. Marked graves numbered 650 in 1969, but interments exceed 1,000. Inscriptions on stones chronicle frontier hardships. Those buried include victims of 1862 yellow fever epidemic; soldiers of Texas Revolution War of 1812, and the Civil War; also Karankawa Indian victims. Several patriots of early Texas are buried here as well. Among them is Samuel Rhoads Fisher, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 28 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.

More markers nearby

• First Burials in Matagorda Cemetery, Benjamin Wightman and Esther Randall Wightman — steps away
• Albert Clinton Horton — steps away
• Richard Royster Royall — steps away
• Ira Ingram — steps away