Memorial Square

The square nearly vanished more than once. In 1899 the city council tried to build over the old burial ground, perhaps for a high school; citizens objected and the school went on the next block. In 1934 a bond for an assembly hall passed. The Bronte Club, a women's literary group, argued that a building could cost the city its Centennial funds for beautifying the square, and the site was saved. More than 200 burials are still unmarked below the grass. Since 1938 it has been a park for markers, with the county monument among them.

What the plaque says

Memorial Square Once the oldest public burial ground in Victoria, this square was laid in 1824 when Martin de Leon founded the town, then located in the Mexican State of "Coahuila and Texas". In early years the cemetery included the block to the east, and many Victoria pioneers were interred here. Burials of soldiers in the Texas Revolution took place in 1836 and later. The cemetery was only occasionally used, however, until 1846, when an ordinance was passed deterring burials in family cemeteries, possibly to combat a cholera epidemic. Many who succumbed were citizens but some were soldiers, under General Zachary Taylor. As the community grew, a larger plot (now Evergreen Cemetery) was purchased in 1850. Later in the Civil War, Confederate soldiers were interred here, but after the war some members of the Federal Army of Occupation unfortunately destroyed many headstones, so that today most of the gravesites are unknown. As burials here gradually ceased, the ground came to be used for other purposes and since 1899 has been designated Memorial Square. It is today devoted to the preservation of monuments to Texas history and to the remembrance of Texas' honored dead. 1968

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.3 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 1.5 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Victoria County — steps away
• Mitchell School — steps away
• Viola Case — steps away
• First English Evangelical Lutheran Church — steps away