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Written by DeadGirl
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Sunday, 10 April 2005 |
Convicts' final resting place provides a lesson in historical neglect
By
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Star-Telegram Staff Writer
HUNTSVILLE - Southeast of the center of this East Texas town, under an umbrella of tall, manicured pines, a mournful breeze blows across a 22-acre hillside plot. It is a cemetery, and cemeteries are expected to be melancholy places, but this one seems especially forlorn.
It is the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, formerly known as Peckerwood Hill, and it is where state prisoners are buried. It is a cemetery of last resort, a place where the bodies go when no one claims them. It is a historically neglected place, and the lives of the men and women buried there have nearly been erased.
Hundreds of blank crosses indicate where the graves are, but they give no hint of who's buried there. Hundreds more provide only a prison number. No more data, no sentiments.
These were prisoners, and no one expects grand statues or monuments. But they were also people, with husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Ideally, even convicts should get some final words; not a tribute, certainly, but an acknowledgement.
Jim Willett, former warden at the Walls Unit and a 30-year veteran of the Texas prison system, has studied the Byrd cemetery. As director of the Texas Prison Museum, Willett has become a prison system historian, and even he is surprised by some of his findings.
"Can you believe there was no written record of who was buried here until 1974?" he said on a recent visit to the grounds. "This cemetery was used for 120 years before there were any records. There are about 260 people buried here who we don't even know who they are."
Willett's research shows that the cemetery was begun in the early 1850s. Apparently, a few burials were carried out before state officials realized that the property didn't belong to them.
The land was eventually donated to the state by Sanford Gibbs and George W. Grant. Willett said the deed describes the land as "the same upon which convicts from the State Penitentiary have been buried since the establishment of said institution, said Burial Ground having been located there-on by mistake."
For the first 100 years, the state used wooden crosses to mark the graves. Over time, the wood rotted and weeds covered the fallen crosses. Capt. Joe Byrd, a longtime assistant warden at the Walls Unit, took it upon himself to clean up the neglected grounds in 1962. But by then, many graves couldn't be identified.
The 312 unidentifiable graves were marked with simple white concrete crosses.
Byrd and his crews located more than 900 graves. Some of the dead were identified using the prison numbers engraved on the crosses; other graves had a tablet-style headstone that was discontinued in the 1940s.
The two most notable markers on the hillside are the large headstones for Kiowa Chief Satanta and a prisoner named Lee Smith.
Satanta was a warrior chief and one of the first American Indians in the Southwest to be tried in a civil court. He was sentenced to be hanged, but that sentence was commuted. He was released from prison but later rearrested and returned to Huntsville. In 1878, he jumped from a second-story window and died. He was buried at Peckerwood Hill until 1963, when his body was moved to Fort Sill, Okla.
Less is known about Lee. He died in 1941 and was apparently a cowboy well-liked by other inmates. His headstone says: "At Rest, In Memory of Rodeo Pals."
Lee was killed while trying to steal another inmate's commissary goods.
Inmates are supposed to be buried at the cemetery only if no one claims the body. Willett said that many times relatives could claim the deceased but don't. They rely on the state to pay for the burial.
In recent years, about 25 percent of deceased inmates have been buried at the cemetery, he said. Inmates are buried in a simple casket, which is placed inside a two-piece plastic shell. Funeral costs run about $2,000 each.
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