Habermehl Cemetery On The San Jacinto Battle Grounds

[FilioScotia]

As someone who grew up in east Harris County, who thought he knew everything worth knowing about the San Jacinto Battleground, I am embarrassed to admit I did not know there is an "active" family cemetery right there in the big middle of it. By "active", I mean people are still being buried there. 

I learned this in an obituary I saw in the Pasadena Citizen online edition this week. It says Mrs Frances Shuttlesworth of Pasadena was buried alongside her husband the Rev. Bill Shuttlesworth in the Habermehl Cemetery on the San Jacinto Battleground.

I Google searched that cemetery name, and learned, to my surprise, that it is right alongside the reflecting pool about halfway between the monument and the Battleship Texas. And it has been there since the late 1800s, some years before the Battleground State Historic Site was created around it in the early 1900s. I went to Google Earth, homed in on the Battleground, and there it is, a small cemetery, plain as day, a long par four from the monument.

On the Habermehl Cemetery website we learn that the "I.W. Brashear family sold the land to Conrad Habermehl in 1860. This tract of land includes the central portion of the park and several rows of graves nearby. The Habermehls built a two-story home on their property. And near the graves there was once a stable and dairy shed. The vegetables and dairy products produced by the Habermehl's were often traded to the sailors of the ships which came up Buffalo Bayou, as well as sold in Lynchburg." 

The website also includes a listing of the people buried there. It shows the first person to be buried there was Caroline Habermehl, who died in 1890. The most recent burial, before Mrs Shuttlesworth, was in 1978.

[Keir sutton]

As a child of 12 , my brothers and i played in the acrage across the river from the monument in an area that i was told the ordinance. Fenced area . no tress pass.  We were kids. Lived not far from terrace park in a Pentecostal old chuch of my uncle milton coonse. One day we discovered some concrete graves . thought to me very eri. There not kept up at all. From the graves we could still see the monument across the spill way.