Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery

Few names survive for the people buried here, so Prairie View A&M historians are working to find them. Elizabeth Burney, interviewed in 1936 by graduate student Frank Edd White, was described as the only living person known to have been enslaved at Alta Vista. She told of beatings, poor food and sickness, and of the dead being rolled into a dug hole. A 2023 survey found nearly 200 possible grave markers, radar and magnetometer work followed in 2024, and researchers think the ground may hold more than 2,000 burials.

What the plaque says

Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery This cemetery is located on land that was originally part of Jared E. Kirby's Alta Vista Plantation. According to oral tradition, the Kirby family set aside this land as a burial site for their slaves, as well as slaves from nearby Liendo Plantation, owned by Kirby's cousin, Leonard Waller Croce. The numerous unmarked graves here are believed to date to the Antebellum period, when most slaves would not have had the resources to erect lasting grave markers. The cemetery continued to be used by African Americans after the Civil War ands after Kirby's widow, Helen Marr Swearingen Kirby, deeded the plantation to the state in 1876 for the Alta Vista College for Colored Youth (now Prairie View A&M University). Later, the cemetery became associated with and named for Wyatt Chapel, a nearby African American church. The oldest marked grave is that of MAttie (Wyatt) Wells (d. 1882), the daughter of a former slave. Area religious leaders, veterans of World Wars I and II, and former slaves and their descendants are also buried here. Used until the 1950s, the cemetery remains a tangible reminder of African Americans' historic presence in this area. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Star of the Republic Museum — 18 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Navasota — 21 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.

More markers nearby

• Prairie View A&M University — 1.1 mi
• Jacob E. Freeman — 1.6 mi
• Gen. George and Libbie Custer Campsite — 2.5 mi
• Liendo — 2.6 mi