First Street Cemetery
Waco, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
As the oldest public cemetery in Waco, First Street Cemetery is the resting place for members of Waco's early and diverse community. Burials include veterans, Masons, Odd Fellows, Woodmen of the World, Knights and Daughters of Tabor and Court of Calanthe. On April 16, 1852, George W. Edwards conveyed five acres of a tract acquired from Jacob de Cordova to the citizens of Waco for a graveyard. Additional acreage was conveyed to the city from the Fraternity of Bosque Lodge No. 92 and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Fences were never erected to establish a set boundary and accurate burials records were not kept. In the 1890s, burials were dug in tiers which resulted in the disturbance of previous burials. In 1968, after years of neglect, the Waco city council voted to relocate graves and/or markers in the lower terrace of the cemetery to the upper terrace. The lower terrace became a recreational campground known as Fort Fisher Park. In 2000, the campground was closed. In 2007, construction on the Texas Ranger Company "F" Headquarters and Education Center began in the lower terrace. During the construction, remains were discovered indicating that only headstones were relocated in 1968. Remains excavated between 2007 and 2010 were reinterred at Rosemound Cemetery. To eliminate future disturbances of remains at First Street Cemetery, the city council rededicated the cemetery on December 7, 2010. The cemetery is designated as a Historic Texas Cemetery and as a State Antiquities Landmark. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Deeded to Waco's citizens in 1852, First Street Cemetery became the growing town's oldest public burial ground, holding veterans and members of numerous fraternal orders. Left unfenced and poorly recorded, its graves were dug in overlapping tiers, and a later campground and construction disturbed the dead—prompting excavations, reinterments, and a formal rededication. Today it is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery and State Antiquities Landmark.
Why it matters
Its troubled history is a cautionary tale about how growing cities have too often built over the graves of their own founders.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Waco grew up on the Brazos River in the middle of the nineteenth century, a frontier crossing that became a real town almost overnight. In 1852, when the land for this cemetery was set aside, Texas was barely a decade past joining the Union, and communities were still busy inventing the basic institutions of settled life — courts, churches, schools, and a place to bury the dead.
The people filling that new burial ground were a cross-section of a raw, ambitious town: veterans, tradesmen, families, and members of the fraternal lodges that were the social backbone of nineteenth-century America. This was an age before public safety nets, when the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Woodmen of the World, and their counterparts provided the insurance, the funeral, and the sense of belonging that a young republic did not.
It was also, tellingly, a diverse community in the ground even when the living town was divided. Among the orders named here are the Knights and Daughters of Tabor and the Court of Calanthe — African American fraternal societies — a reminder that early Waco's story was never a single story, and that its founders came from more than one world.
People & events
The paper trail begins in April 1852, when George W. Edwards conveyed five acres to the citizens of Waco for a graveyard. The land had come out of a larger tract acquired from Jacob de Cordova, one of the era's great promoters of Texas settlement. More ground was added later by a Masonic lodge and by the Odd Fellows, and so a public cemetery took shape — but casually, without the fences and careful records that later generations would wish for.
That casual beginning had consequences that unfolded across a century. Because no firm boundary was ever fixed and burial records were never properly kept, the dead accumulated in ways no one fully tracked. By the 1890s graves were being dug in tiers, one layer disturbing another. A place meant to be permanent had become, quietly, a place where the past was being built over.
The reckoning came in the twentieth century. In 1968 the city voted to move graves and markers from the lower terrace, which became a recreational campground; decades later, when construction began there for a Texas Ranger headquarters and education center, workers made a sobering discovery. Remains were still in the ground — proof that in 1968 only the headstones had been moved, not the people beneath them. Excavations from 2007 to 2010 recovered those remains for reburial elsewhere, and on a December day in 2010 the city formally rededicated the cemetery to keep it from being disturbed again.
Its place in the American story
First Street Cemetery tells a story that belongs to towns all across America, not just to Waco. As cities grew, their earliest burial grounds — often on what had been the edge of town — ended up in the path of expansion. Again and again, the graves of a community's founders were paved, built over, or quietly forgotten, because the living had more use for the land than the dead could argue for.
What happened here is also a chapter in a larger national reckoning about how we treat human remains and historic graves. The discovery that markers had been moved while bodies stayed put is a stark version of a mistake made in many places. The careful excavation, respectful reinterment, and legal protection that followed reflect a modern shift — codified in preservation laws and in designations like Historic Texas Cemetery and State Antiquities Landmark — toward treating even the humblest graveyard as sacred and worth defending.
And because the people buried here span the fraternal, ethnic, and social spectrum of frontier Texas, the cemetery is a genuine archive of who built the town. Protecting it is a way of insisting that a community's history includes everyone who lies in its ground, not only the names that made it into the record books.
If you visit
This is a place that rewards a thoughtful, unhurried visit. It sits in a part of Waco layered with history, near the Brazos and close to institutions built long after the first graves were dug. What you are looking at is not a tidy memorial park but a landscape that carries the marks of its own troubled century — terraces, relocations, and the outlines of decisions made and later regretted.
Read the marker slowly and let the sequence of dates sink in: a graveyard begun in 1852, disturbed for generations, and finally given a formal promise of peace in 2010. Look for the fraternal symbols on the stones — the linked chain of the Odd Fellows, the tree-stump monuments of the Woodmen — small carved clues to the societies that once organized daily life and death.
As a stop on a Central Texas route, it makes a quiet counterpoint to the region's brighter attractions. Come here to think about permanence and neglect, about what a town owes its founders, and about how recently we have learned to protect the ground we once so easily disturbed. Walk gently; this is, after all, still a cemetery.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · George W. Edwards
- · Jacob de Cordova
Related events
- · Rededication of First Street Cemetery (2010)
Themes & tags
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