Old Bayview Cemetery

The plaque's list of veterans leaves out that this was once the town's only cemetery, and it buried nearly everyone. Historian Leila Webb noted that no lots were ever sold here. About forty Black people are thought to lie in it, some enslaved by white families buried nearby, along with Union soldiers Henry Chapman and William Warfield, who came with the Federal occupation, and the Buffalo Soldier George Owens, honored with a state marker in 2019. Early burials crossed lines of race and class, though the city around it was strictly segregated by the twentieth century.

What the plaque says

Old Bayview Cemetery The oldest federal military cemetery in Texas, Old Bayview was laid out by U.S. Army engineers while Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor was encamped in Corpus Christi on the eve of the Mexican War. On Sept. 13, 1845, the steamer "Dayton", used to transfer men from St. Joseph's Island to Corpus Christi, burst a boiler near McGloin's Bluff (Old Ingleside), killing seven soldiers. Taylor obtained a burial site from H.L. Kinney, founder of Corpus Christi. Col. Hitchcock, who served under Taylor, wrote: "On September 14, a military funeral took place at the burial ground which I selected. It is on the brow of the hill northwest of camp, and commands a view of the Nueces and Corpus Christi bays. It is a beautiful spot." After Taylor's army left Corpus Christi in 1846, the cemetery became the community burial ground. Here are graves of pioneer settlers, and of veterans of War of 1812, Texas War for independence, Mexican War, Indian campaigns, Civil War, and later conflicts. Markers bear the names of men of the 9th U.S. Cavalry, 1st U.S. Infantry, 38th U.S. Infantry, U.S. Mounted Rifles, and 1st Texas Cavalry. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.8 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.0 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.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 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.

More markers nearby

• Explosion of the Steamship Dayton — steps away
• Louis de Planque — steps away
• Anna Moore Schwein — steps away
• John Dix — steps away