Velasco Cemetery

The cemetery belongs to a boom that lasted about a decade. A new Velasco was surveyed in 1891, and on July 7 the secretary of the Treasury formally opened the port. Lots worth more than a million dollars sold within a year, mainly to Midwesterners. By 1892 the town counted 136 businesses, 167 residences, an electric light plant and a planing mill. A lighthouse, a national bank and two weekly newspapers followed by 1896, and jetties finished in 1897 gave the harbor seventeen and a half feet of water. About 3,000 people lived here when the 1900 hurricane struck.

What the plaque says

Velasco Cemetery In 1891 Brazos Investment Company dedicated these 2.5 acres as the only public cemetery in the county, except for an early slave graveyard, Clute. The deed calls for usage without charge for plots. Earliest grave marker 1893. Maintained by Velasco Cemetery Association. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 7.3 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 16 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 20 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Galveston Island State Park — 30 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.

More markers nearby

• Four Miles Southeast to the Original Town of Velasco — 1.0 mi
• Velasco Lodge No. 757, A. F. & A. M. — 1.1 mi
• Colonel Robert M. Coleman — 1.3 mi
• Site of Town of Old Velasco — 1.6 mi