Sunshine Cemetery

The cemetery's address is a clue: it sits at Rodd Field. Rodd Field was a Navy airfield on 861 acres bought in 1940 and commissioned in June 1941, named for Lieutenant Herbert C. Rodd, radio officer of the Curtiss NC-4, which made the first transatlantic flight in May 1919. Rodd died in a 1932 seaplane crash near Hampton Roads. The plaque dates the Sunshine community's end to the early 1940s, the years the field was built. It trained Navy pilots, closed in 1956, and later held a NASA tracking station.

What the plaque says

Sunshine Cemetery From the late 1800's until the early 1940's, the Sunshine Community encompasses this part of what is now Corpus Christi. The small farming and ranching settlement, also known as encinal, boasted a school, union church, and post office. The sunshine school was in operation from 1887 until 1942, when it was consolidated with the Aberdeen School. Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, and other denominations alternated Sunday services at the Union Church. The post office and the cemetery at this site are the only physical remnants of the Sunshine Community. The oldest marked grave in the cemetery, that of Ethel Eva Capeheart, is dated 1903. Tombstones in the Sunshine Cemetery reflect the family names of some of the early settlers who came to the area. John James Parry (d. 1920), a native of Wales, came to Texas in 1872. A farmer and rancher, Parry also preached Baptist services at the Union Church. His wife, Mary Elizabeth (1854-1935), and five of their ten children and buried in the Parry Family plot. The Haney Family section includes the burial site of James Silas Haney (1871-1939), his wife Ella Smith (1882-1962), and seven of their ten children. Other members of the Sunshine Community and their descendants also are buried here. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 8.6 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 — 9.5 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 — 9.7 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 — 9.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Karankawa People — 2.3 mi
• Jovita González de Mireles — 3.1 mi
• Ward Island — 3.1 mi
• WWII Meeting of Presidents Camacho and Roosevelt — 3.1 mi