Site of Indian Point Mass Grave of 1919 Hurricane Victims

This plaque ends with the graves; the story of the dead went on. The storm swept living and dead across Nueces Bay on wreckage, and more than thirty graves were dug from Indian Point to a spot some twenty miles up the bay. Funeral director Maxwell P. Dunne began the exhumations at nearby White Point, and the remains went by barge to Corpus Christi for identification. Those never identified were buried together at Rose Hill Cemetery. On January 25, 1923, about 3,500 people watched the Red Cross unveil an eight-ton Llano granite boulder for the unidentified dead.

What the plaque says

Site of Indian Point Mass Grave of 1919 Hurricane Victims In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 14, 1919, a hurricane made landfall in Corpus Christi after gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks. Crowds packed the North Beach area for their last weekend of the summer season, most continuing to ignore the last-minute evacuation warnings of police officers, firefighters and soldiers from Fort Brown. The rapidly rising water blocked vacationers from escaping to higher ground. As the water rose, people climbed to their rooftops and tied ropes to themselves and their children so that they might not be lost. A giant wave of water carrying oil from ruptured tanks on Harbor Island, timber from Port Aransas and cotton bales from a dock in Corpus Christi crashed down on North Beach, sweeping its victims into the black waters of Nueces Bay. On Monday morning the sun rose on a scene of terrible destruction. Though the official death toll was 284, estimates place the actual number, including those lost at sea, at one thousand. In the ensuing days, the survivors worked together to rebuild their homes, rescue the injured and bury the dead in mass graves, some containing more than fifty bodies, using farm implements as undertaking tools. A month later the bodies were removed to Rose Hill Cemetery in Corpus Christi and other sites as requested by friends and family members. Property damage and crop losses were estimated at twenty million dollars. The great storm of 1919 was the worst disaster to hit Corpus Christi in the twentieth Century. The mass graves at Indian Point were about one hundred yards east of this site. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 3.7 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 3.9 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 — 4.1 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.
• Mirador de la Flor — 4.8 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

• Reef Road — steps away
• Site of Bay View College — 1.9 mi
• Nueces County — 4.1 mi
• Corpus Christi and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway — 4.2 mi