I hope everyone is thawing out from last week’s arctic blast. Thankfully, it was a non-event here, but it was pretty nasty from the Texas panhandle to North Carolina. As I said before, I’d take a hurricane over any storm with ice or snow in it. To me, jacket weather is anything under 67 degrees, so take that as you will.
One positive side to the cold weather (besides the white beans and tamales smelling up the house) was my ability to finish digitizing a year’s worth of research, and boy, was it a mixture of both Southeast-Texas and World-War-II history. I also had a lot of entries from Find a Grave and Ancestry.com of people that I had to struggle to find why I was looking them up in the first place. This happens when someone contacts the Jefferson County Historical Commission (JCHC) because they saw a headstone on their new property or they drove by a property they’ve driven by for years and thought they were passing a cemetery, and then someone moved all the stones into a pile. These inquiries are taken seriously, and we get a couple of them yearly.
Most of the time, some headstones are discarded because the family has purchased another for their plots. This, at least, has usually been the case while I have been Cemetery Chair at the JCHC. I don’t know the etiquette of how to discard an old headstone, but a few years back, Magnolia Cemetery had an erosion problem around Babyland (a section for buried infants), so they used some of the discarded stones to help stop the erosion. This is a great idea to me, but if you are not in the know, and have no idea what is happening and are concerned you usually contact 12NewsNow instead of inquiring if there is a problem at the cemetery. “Of course, the graves are falling in Brakes Bayou. Film at 10.” Shout out to Gene Tuck! A blast from the past. I wonder if he still rides dirt bikes, but I digress.
We had someone contact the JCHC early last year about a possible incident of cemetery desecration on Moore Road near Sour Lake Road. Apparently, someone put a considerable number of old discarded headstones on a property in rows, and they were there for at least a few years because some people I talked to thought it was a cemetery. One day, someone drove by and saw they were all in a pile. Thinking that the owner was desecrating a cemetery, they contacted us. We thanked the person for the call because it is not beyond someone in our history to do this. Luckily, these were discarded stones. We traced them to Magnolia Cemetery. Most were from Section Seven, but all were accounted for. I have no idea who owned the property and decided years ago to place a fake cemetery on their property, but I do know that with all the land for sale on that road, no one wants the burden of dealing with a cemetery, fake or real. Ask a realtor!
A few cemeteries here in Jefferson County are abandoned, and some are even under concrete. W.T. Block wrote about a cemetery in Port Neches on Dearing and Rachford, the owner of which bulldozed the headstones in the 1940s. I believe Block because he was really pissed off when he wrote the article. He had just returned from the “European campaign” (World War II) and found the headstones removed and the graves under a slab.
Another cemetery that has been lost to time is the La Blue cemetery, which may have been a part of Spell Cemetery on Caswell Road. It is located between Spell Cemetery and the Dupont Credit Union (yes, under the highway). When you drive north over the LNVA Canal, you are driving over a cemetery under Highway 69-96-287. There is no record of burial removals. I will leave a link to an article I did on the Lewis Cemetery located somewhere between 19th and 23rd streets in the Calder addition. It also has been forgotten, and its were-a-bouts unknown.
During my research, which I digitized last week, I also came upon two articles from 1903 and 1910. The 1903 article stated that there were two coffins uncovered on Washington Street and Jefferson Street while a sewer line was being put in. (Washington Street is no longer a street. It was replaced with a railroad track.) The journalist wrote that this may have been the location of Robinson Cemetery, “which went out of commission in 1869 or 1870.” The 1910 article was more extravagant. The old cemetery was thought to be someone from the pirate Jean Lafitte’s gang. (Note: the pirate Jean Lafitte and his men are thought to be buried in this county and Orange County. I call B.S. If you disagree, then show me the money! Whether he died in France, Honduras, or an apartment in Los Angeles, I don’t care.) Argh!
A week later, I found another article stating that the land was a burial site used during the Civil War. Since then, there have been discussions of just how many people were buried there because of wounds inflicted during the Battle of Sabine Pass or from the yellow fever (“yellow Jack”). Some say 100, others say 500. I doubt we will ever know. I’ll leave a link to an article written by Judith Linsley about this cemetery and how historian Bill Quick found out the real story of Union Navy Lieutenant Robert Rhodes’s fate at the Battle of Sabine Pass. Also, I want to give a shout-out to Bitsy for reminding me of this history a couple of weeks back. You are missing out if you are not a Facebook follower of BeaumontTexasHistoryBits.
“Susie Spindletop’s Weekly Letter” was a permanent fixture each Sunday morning in the Beaumont Enterprise. There were a few occasions when Florence Stratton missed a week or two while traveling, but for the most part, Beaumonteers looked forward to reading about the gossip of their neighbors, or even themselves. In January of 1929, though, it was not good month for Florence. On January 9, she lost her sister Louise after being ill for several months. Then, on January 14, she lost who I consider to be her best friend, Willie Cooper Hobby, wife of W.P. Hobby. Needless to say, there was no new “Weekly Letter” from January 6 to February 3.
I’ve never found much information on Louise other than that she had been sickly all her life. She lived with her mother, Louisa, and father, Asa Stratton, until her mother’s death in 1895. After that, it seems she lived at different times with her older sister Emily and her husband, Walter Stevens, her sister Florence, and her father and new stepmother, Ina Smith Stratton.
I’ve stepped away from this research for a year now and believe it is time to jump back in. My goal this year, for what it’s worth, is to look into the Stratton family, particularly Louise and her mother, Louisa Waldman Stratton. To be continued.
As for Willie Copper Hobby, I’ll have something to say about her on the 14th.
Until then, ciao for now!
Mysteries of the Battle of Sabine Pass:
https://www.sfasu.edu/heritagecenter/3935.asp
Lewis Cemetery:
