Nuecestown Cemetery

The plaque says two of the men buried here were kidnapped in the 1875 raid and escaped. An early account in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly names a justice of the peace, W. A. Ball, and a storekeeper, George Franks, presumably the same men. Ball was held with the mail carrier and a few others after the rest of the prisoners were freed at dark, then taken some distance and let go. Franks tried to stop the raiders hanging his elderly servant, was put in chains and abused, and the servant was hanged. The account does not say Franks escaped.

What the plaque says

Nuecestown Cemetery This burial ground served the original residents of the Nuecestown community. The settlement was established in 1852 by Col. Henry Lawrence Kinney (b. 1814) who owned a trading post at Corpus Christi, 13.5 miles southeast. Originally called "The Motts" because of a grove of large trees, it was later named for the nearby Nueces River. Land was deeded to the settlers by the H.L. Kinney Estate for use as a public cemetery. The earliest known grave is that of Elizabeth Beynon who died in Nuecestown on December 4, 1854, at the age of four. Her parents Benjamin and Elizabeth B. Beynon died the following year and are also buried here. Two citizens interred at this site, William Ball (1831-1897) and George Frank (1834-1904), were kidnapped by bandits in an 1875 raid on the community. Both men managed to escape their captors and returned to Nuecestown. Other graves include those of six confederate veterans of the civil war, one world War I veteran, and one victim of the 1919 hurricane. Nuecestown was once the site of a Stagecoach Inn, public ferry, meat packing plant, cotton gin, post office, school, general store, churches, and blacksmith shop, but only the cemetery remains. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Aquarium — 12 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 12 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 13 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Mirador de la Flor — 13 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium — steps away
• Nuecestown Raid — 0.5 mi
• Calallen — 2.6 mi
• Bethel Baptist Church of Christ and Cemetery — 5.6 mi