Texas City Memorial Cemetery

The number of the dead is the hard fact here. The plaque counts 444 confirmed dead and 143 missing; the anchor monument at the memorial records 576 known dead, 398 of them identified and 178 missing. The gap is easier to understand knowing that all of Monsanto's personnel and payroll records were destroyed, and that many dock workers were itinerants who were hard to identify. Almost everyone in the dock area, firemen, ships' crews and spectators, was killed, and most of the bodies were never recovered. Sixty-three people are buried here unnamed.

What the plaque says

Texas City Memorial Cemetery On April 16 and 17, 1947, disastrous explosions aboard two ships docked at the Texas City port killed hundreds of people. In the weeks that followed, relief workers led by the American Red Cross and other volunteers labored to identify the victims. Temporary morgues were set up in the Central High school gymnasium and at Camp Wallace, a former Army post. Eventually, 444 people were confirmed dead, and an additional 143 were listed as missing. Sixty-three bodies were never identified. There was no public cemetery in Texas City in 1947. A burial committee appointed by local officials used donated funds to purchase this two-acre tract of land and made plans to bury the unidentified victims on Sunday, June 22. An interfaith and interracial funeral service was conducted before an estimated 5,000 mourners. Funeral homes from 28 towns provided individual caskets and hearses, and florists from throughout Texas donated flowers. The Texas City Memorial Cemetery is still reserved for the 63 people who, although unknown by name, are remembered each year at a memorial service on the 16th of April. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 11 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 11 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Moody Mansion — 11 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 11 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Texas City — 1.5 mi
• First Methodist Church of Texas City — 2.7 mi
• Shoal Point and Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse — 2.8 mi
• William Jefferson Jones — 2.8 mi