Evergreen Cemetery
Beeville, Bee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Block 1, Beeville original townsite, donated 1859 by Anne Burke. First owned by G.W. McClanahan, land was bought 1862 by county for "Public Burying Ground". In 1872, H.W. Wilson donated northeast strip, land was added on the northwest, and Court gave consent for a fence. Cemetery was restored in 1970. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On land donated in 1859 as Beeville's townsite took shape, this South Texas burying ground was formally purchased by the county in 1862 for use as a public cemetery. Over the following decades neighbors added strips of adjoining land and fenced the grounds, knitting the graveyard into the fabric of the growing frontier community. A 1970 restoration preserved the resting place of the town's pioneer families.
Why it matters
Community cemeteries like Evergreen are among the most durable records of frontier settlement, marking where a town first put down roots and buried its founders.
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Related people
- · Anne Burke
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McClanahan House
Beeville, TX
Erected about 1867 near Poesta Creek on the courthouse square, this is Beeville's oldest business building—a pioneer-western structure with southern porches that housed a general store, lodging house, and post office. It was built by G. W. McClanahan, the town's first merchant, who also served as schoolteacher, postmaster, county clerk, innkeeper, and Sunday school superintendent.
Glenwood Cemetery
Beeville, TX
When Beeville's Evergreen Cemetery began to fill, local undertaker Christopher Rotzien bought adjoining land in 1901, and Margaret Ann Eeds became the first burial that April. Taken over by the Beeville Cemetery Association the next year and expanded over the decades, Glenwood grew into a landscaped resting place for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish citizens, including war veterans and the sister of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.
First Methodist Church of Beeville
Beeville, TX
In 1861, just three years after Bee County was organized, the Rev. Berry Merchant helped Beeville Methodists establish a congregation, and for years circuit-riding preachers ministered to them, often in the county's small wood-frame courthouse. The church built its first sanctuary in the early 1870s, relocated to this site in 1904, and grew steadily as Beeville became a Methodist district headquarters. Denominational mergers reshaped its name over the twentieth century.
George Home
Beeville, TX
In 1890, Will H. and Julia George raised this elegant cottage on land Julia inherited from her father, Maj. J.H. Wood, a New Yorker who had come south to fight in the Texas War for Independence before building a cattle empire. Reusing materials from an earlier house on the property, the couple created a home whose finely detailed woodwork made it a center of Beeville's social and cultural life around the turn of the century. Remodeled in 1900, it has passed down through Wood's descendants.