Hatch Cemetery
Port Lavaca, Calhoun County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery served the Hatch family and other members of the former community of Chocolate. Captain Sylvanus Hatch, founder of the settlement, was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts on June 1, 1788. He became a contractor and builder, eventually moving to Louisiana, where in 1821 he married Pamela Louisa Nicholson Brown, a widow who had three children from her previous marriage; Sylvanus and Pamela would have three additional children, much of Captain Hatch's life was devoted to military service. he served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under General Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans. Later, he served in the Texas War for Independence. Sylvanus Hatch and his family came to Texas in the 1820s, moving to the Chocolate Creek area by 1842. The Hatch family became involved in civic, church and educational activities. Captain Hatch established the cemetery in 1850, when his wife, Pamela, died of Cholera. She and her husband had been attending to German immigrants with the disease who had docked at Indianola; victims of the outbreak are interred here. Captain Hatch and two of his sons, John and Davis, who were both Confederate veterans, are buried here as well. Also interred are members of the Brett and Foester families, as well as other community members. Cemetery features include curbing and a 1936 Texas centennial marker for Sylvanus Hatch. In 1959, Hatch Bend Country Club purchased this property. Since that time, the club has maintained the burial ground. Today, Hatch Cemetery continues to serve as a record of a pioneering Texas Family. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground served the family of Captain Sylvanus Hatch, a Cape Cod–born builder who served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before later joining the Texas War for Independence. The Hatch family reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, and the captain established the cemetery in 1850 when his wife Pamela died of cholera—an outbreak that also killed German immigrants who had landed at Indianola and lie buried here. Hatch and two Confederate-veteran sons are interred among other pioneering families.
Why it matters
The cemetery links a veteran of the young republic's wars to the settling of the Texas Gulf Coast and the immigrant waves that suffered the era's deadly coastal epidemics.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas Gulf Coast that Captain Sylvanus Hatch settled was a raw and hopeful edge of the American world. In the 1840s and 1850s the young state of Texas—only recently an independent republic, then newly admitted to the Union—was drawing settlers down to the coastal prairies between the bays and creeks that drained into the Gulf of Mexico. Chocolate Creek, near present-day Port Lavaca in Calhoun County, was one of dozens of small farming and ranching communities that sprang up in this period, close enough to the water to trade, far enough inland to farm.
This was also a coast defined by its ports of entry. Nearby Indianola, on Matagorda Bay, was becoming one of the busiest immigrant landings in Texas, the gateway through which thousands of newcomers—especially German families—stepped onto Texas soil for the first time. That traffic brought commerce and community, but it also brought disease. In an age before anyone understood how cholera spread through contaminated water, a single ship could carry an epidemic ashore, and coastal settlements had almost no defense against it.
Against that backdrop, the founding of a family cemetery in 1850 was not a quiet formality. It was the mark of a community putting down permanent roots—and, too often, of the heavy price those roots cost.
People & events
Sylvanus Hatch was born on Cape Cod, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1788, and his long life reads like a map of the expanding nation. Trained as a contractor and builder, he moved to Louisiana, where in 1821 he married Pamela Louisa Nicholson Brown, a widow with three children; together they would have three more. But much of his life was given to soldiering: he served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under General Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and years later took up arms again in the Texas War for Independence.
The Hatch family came to Texas in the 1820s and reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, throwing themselves into the civic, church, and educational life of the settlement they helped build. Then came 1850. When German immigrants sick with cholera landed at Indianola, Sylvanus and Pamela went to care for them—and Pamela caught the disease and died. Her grief-stricken husband established this cemetery to bury her, and the immigrant victims of the same outbreak were laid to rest here beside her.
The ground holds the rest of the family's story too. Captain Hatch is buried here, along with two of his sons, John and Davis, both Confederate veterans of the Civil War that came a decade after Pamela's death. Members of the Brett and Foester families and other neighbors from the vanished community of Chocolate lie here as well, so that the cemetery became a record not just of one family but of an entire settlement.
Its place in the American story
One life can sometimes carry the whole arc of a nation's early history, and Sylvanus Hatch's did. Born in the first years of the American republic, he stood on the field at New Orleans in the war that secured the young country's independence a second time, then helped wrest a new republic from the map of the Southwest, and finally saw his own sons march off to the Civil War. A single grave marker gathers up the War of 1812, Texas independence, and the Confederacy in one family plot.
The cemetery also preserves a chapter of the great nineteenth-century immigration that peopled the American interior. The German families who came ashore at Indianola were part of a wave that reshaped Texas and the whole country—and the ones buried here are a reminder that the journey to a new land was often deadly, and that epidemics were among the frontier's most relentless killers.
There is, finally, a quiet lesson in stewardship here. When Hatch Bend Country Club bought the property in 1959, it took on the care of the burial ground rather than erasing it. That a private club has maintained a pioneer cemetery for generations is its own small parable about how communities choose to keep faith with the people who came before them.
If you visit
Come to a place like this expecting stillness rather than spectacle. A family cemetery on the coastal Texas prairie is a modest, human-scaled site—weathered stones, the hush of grass and wind off the bays, the sense that you are standing where a whole vanished community gathered to mourn.
Look for the older features that set this ground apart: the curbing that outlines the plots, and the 1936 Texas centennial marker placed for Sylvanus Hatch, one of thousands set across the state during its hundredth-anniversary celebration to honor the founders of early Texas. Reading the family names together—Hatch, Brett, Foester—you begin to feel the shape of the lost settlement of Chocolate that once surrounded this spot.
If you're threading together a Gulf Coast road trip through Calhoun County, this makes a thoughtful stop between the bigger draws of the bay country. Pair it in your mind with nearby Indianola, the immigrant port whose story is bound up with the graves here, and you'll leave with a fuller picture of how this coast was settled—and at what cost. Please treat the grounds gently and with respect; this is a working burial place, still cared for and still visited.
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
- · Sylvanus Hatch
- · Pamela Louisa Nicholson Brown
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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This marker records the lives of Sylvanus Hatch, born in Massachusetts in 1788, and his wife Phamelia, born in Mississippi the same year, whose long lives spanned the founding decades of the American republic and Texas. Hatch lived to 1885, dying on the Texas Gulf coast near Port Lavaca. The stone preserves the memory of an early settler couple in this corner of the state.
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This burial ground served the Clark family of the vanished Chocolate community, named for nearby Chocolate Creek where Sylvanus Hatch and his brother Joseph settled in 1846. Residents raised cattle and horses, farmed, and worshipped at St. Paul's-on-the-Prairie, whose building also housed the school. In the mid-1850s John Clark arrived and built stock pens known as Clark's Station along the Indianola Railroad, letting area farmers ship crops and cattle to market; he deeded this cemetery in 1899.
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