Calvary Catholic Cemetery
San Angelo, Tom Green County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This Catholic cemetery was created June 12, 1893. The first burial, that of Yrinia Buendia, took place within the month. Graves with earlier dates are transferred burials. A memorial altar and crucifixion scene were erected in 1960. A security fence was added when the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo was established in 1961. Mausoleums and modern improvements arrived after 1985. Today, all affairs of these well-kept grounds are coordinated by a committee of local Catholic church representatives. The heritage of area pioneers, veterans, church leaders, parishioners and their families is chronicled here with reverence and honor. Historic Texas Cemetery - 1998
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Established on June 12, 1893, Calvary Catholic Cemetery received its first burial — that of Yrinia Buendia — within the month, while graves bearing earlier dates were moved here from older grounds. A memorial altar and crucifixion scene were raised in 1960, and a security fence followed when the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo was created in 1961. Today a committee of local parishes tends the grounds, which hold generations of area pioneers, veterans, and church families.
Why it matters
The cemetery chronicles the Catholic community that helped settle the San Angelo region and grew large enough to become the seat of its own diocese.
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Related people
- · Yrinia Buendia
Related events
- · Establishment of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo (1961)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John Ingram
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John Ingram was born in Kentucky in 1808 and came west to join the fight for Texas independence, standing among the men at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He lived on through the years of the Republic and early statehood, dying in San Angelo in 1896 at the age of 87. His grave marks the long life of one of the ordinary soldiers whose victory won Texas its independence.
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Episcopal worship in the San Angelo area began at frontier Fort Concho in 1871, and the first parish church rose in 1888 with help from Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore. The present 1929 building incorporates stones and a bell from the 1884 Tom Green County Courthouse and garden-wall stones from the 1884 Ragsdale Building. In this way the church physically preserves fragments of the town's earliest civic architecture.
Original Tom Green County
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When it was created in 1874, Tom Green County sprawled across nearly 12,800 square miles of West Texas — more than ten times the size of Rhode Island — astride the California gold-rush trail and the old Butterfield Overland Mail route. Named for Confederate general and Texas statesman Thomas Green, it drew German colonists, cattlemen like the Tankersleys, and settlers who pressed in despite earlier resistance from Native peoples. Over the following decades the giant county was carved into more than a dozen smaller ones as the railroad and new towns reshaped the region.
The Tenth Cavalry
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