Ebony Grove Cemetery
Mercedes, Hidalgo County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery, named for the land's clusters of ebony trees, began in 1922. The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company developed Mercedes and about 200 square miles of adjacent farmlands, also deeding nearly nine acres to the Mercedes Cemetery Association, which still cares for the burial ground. Among the earliest marked graves are those of siblings Maude Evans (d. 1876) and Eugene E. Evans, Jr. (d. 1881), whose remains were reinterred from another cemetery. Ebony Grove Cemetery is shaped like a shield, bounded by the Arroyo Colorado on three sides with an ordered plot layout. Notable landscape features include stone slab covers and fraternal organization gravestones. Historic Texas Cemetery – 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Named for the clusters of ebony trees on its grounds, this shield-shaped cemetery began in 1922 when the American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company—developer of Mercedes and some 200 square miles of surrounding farmland—deeded nearly nine acres to the local cemetery association. Bounded on three sides by the Arroyo Colorado, it holds early reinterred graves of the Evans siblings and features stone slab covers and fraternal gravestones.
Why it matters
It marks the irrigation-driven land boom that turned the Lower Rio Grande Valley into productive farmland and drew the settlers who built its towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Lower Rio Grande Valley of the early twentieth century was being remade by water. What had been dry brushland was transformed, tract by tract, into some of the most productive farmland in the country — but only because irrigation companies dug the canals that carried Rio Grande water across the flats. This was the great Valley land boom, and it drew settlers, speculators, and farmers by the thousands.
Mercedes was a product of exactly that boom. The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company developed the town and roughly two hundred square miles of surrounding farmland, selling the promise of irrigated acreage to newcomers. Where there is settlement, though, there must also be burial ground, and a permanent community needs a permanent place to lay its dead.
So in 1922 the same company that carved out the farms deeded nearly nine acres for a cemetery. The land held clusters of ebony trees, and those gave the place its name. Its care passed to the Mercedes Cemetery Association, which still tends it — a thread of continuity running from the boom years to today.
People & events
Among the earliest marked graves here are two that predate the cemetery itself: the siblings Maude Evans, who died in 1876, and Eugene E. Evans, Jr., who died in 1881. Their remains were reinterred from another cemetery, carried to this new ground so that family could rest together in the community's chosen place. That act of moving the dead speaks to how much a permanent cemetery meant to a young town — it was where a scattered past could be gathered and kept.
The cemetery has a distinctive shape and setting. It is laid out like a shield, bounded on three sides by the Arroyo Colorado, with an ordered plan to its plots. The waterway that helps define its outline is a fitting frame for a burial ground born of a region reshaped by water.
Among its features are stone slab covers over graves and the gravestones of fraternal organizations. Those fraternal markers are their own kind of history, evidence of the lodges and brotherhoods that knit early American communities together and followed their members even into the cemetery.
Its place in the American story
A cemetery may seem a quiet, local thing, but this one is a ledger of a national transformation. The irrigation-driven land boom that created Mercedes turned the Lower Rio Grande Valley into a farming powerhouse and pulled in the settlers who built its towns. To read the founding of Ebony Grove is to read the arrival of modern agriculture in a corner of America that water reengineered.
Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery underscores a broader American practice: preserving burial grounds not merely as sacred space but as primary historical documents. The names, dates, and even the styles of the stones record who came, when, and how they chose to be remembered.
And the fraternal gravestones connect this small Valley plot to a nationwide phenomenon — the golden age of American lodges and fraternal orders, whose members carried their bonds and their emblems to the grave. In details like these, a local cemetery becomes a place where the larger currents of American social life can be traced.
If you visit
Ebony Grove Cemetery sits in Mercedes, in the heart of Hidalgo County's Rio Grande Valley, and it repays a slow, respectful walk. Look first for the ebony trees that gave the ground its name, then notice its unusual shield-like shape and the Arroyo Colorado curving along three of its sides — a layout you can almost feel once you know to look for it.
Seek out the older stones. The reinterred Evans siblings, with dates in the 1870s and 1880s, are a tangible link to lives that ended before this cemetery existed. And study the fraternal emblems carved into the markers; each one is a small clue about the clubs and brotherhoods that shaped a member's life.
As a road-trip stop it pairs naturally with the story of the Valley's farms and canals. Before or after you visit, take in the surrounding irrigated country and remember that both the fields and this quiet, ordered burial ground trace back to the same audacious idea: that Rio Grande water could turn brushland into a place where communities — and their memories — would take root and stay.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Maude Evans
- · Eugene E. Evans, Jr.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mercedes City Hall
Mercedes, TX
Built in 1928 to house Mercedes' municipal offices and fire station, this two-story red-brick building was designed by Weslaco architect R. Newell Waters in a Gothic style, complete with a copper cupola for the fire alarm and a second-floor meeting room that doubled as a firemen's dormitory. It anchored civic life in one of the young agricultural boomtowns of the Rio Grande Valley for nearly fifty years. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1995.
The Hidalgo County Bank and Trust Company
Mercedes, TX
The Hidalgo County Bank and Trust Company opened in 1907 in a modest frame house on a Mercedes side street and grew into the oldest bank still operating in the county. Its founders were leading men of the lower Rio Grande, and steady management carried it through the Great Depression of the 1930s. The bank became a force in the development of the Rio Grande Valley.
Mercedes Enterprise
Mercedes, TX
Isadore Moritz launched the Mercedes Enterprise on October 8, 1908, in the young Rio Grande Valley town of Mercedes. Over the following decades the local press evolved through a tangle of competing and merging papers—the Tribune, the News-Item, the News-Tribune—until Paul Netz restored the original Enterprise name in 1941. The paper chronicled community milestones through anniversary editions and offered bilingual printing to area schools, businesses, and agencies.
The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation System
Mercedes, TX
In 1905, at the dawn of the Lower Rio Grande Valley's transformation into an agricultural powerhouse, developer B. F. Yoakum gathered investors to turn arid brushland into irrigated farmland. Their company bought a quarter-million acres and built the townsite of Mercedes as its headquarters, and by 1908 pumps were lifting river water into a growing web of canals. Within a dozen years the system had swelled to three main canals and five pumping plants, and it passed to public water districts in 1930 that still serve Valley farmers today.