Old Bayview Cemetery
Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established 1845 Historic Texas Cemetery-2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Old Bayview Cemetery was established in 1845, in the same era that Corpus Christi took root as a coastal settlement and Texas moved toward statehood. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it is among the oldest burial grounds in the region and holds the earliest chapters of the city's story. Its founding date alone anchors it to the very beginnings of the community it served.
Why it matters
As one of the oldest cemeteries on the South Texas coast, it marks the frontier moment when Corpus Christi was born and the Republic of Texas gave way to American statehood.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
George Owens
Corpus Christi, TX
Born into slavery in Kentucky in 1843, George Owens enlisted in the Union Army in 1864 and served with the 116th United States Colored Infantry through the Appomattox Campaign that ended the Civil War. He then joined the newly formed 9th Cavalry—one of the regiments Plains nations called Buffalo Soldiers—patrolling and guarding the west Texas frontier before settling in Corpus Christi, where he died in 1879.
John Dix
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Born in Massachusetts in 1796, John Dix packed several American lifetimes into one: a teenage privateer in the War of 1812, a shipwrecked sea captain, a Michigan town founder, and a private in the Texian army during the Texas Revolution. Settling at Corpus Christi, he prospered as a sheep rancher and federal revenue inspector before the Civil War split his family — Dix, a staunch Unionist, was indicted for treason against the Confederacy in 1864. After the war he served as chief justice of Nueces County until near his death in 1870.
Friendship Monument - Captain Blas Maria de la Garcia Falcon
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Captain Blas María de la Garza Falcón (1712–1767) was among the Spanish colonizers who pushed settlement into the lower Rio Grande and South Texas frontier in the mid-1700s, establishing ranches and outposts on land that Spain, and later Mexico, claimed. This 'Friendship Monument' frames his legacy as a bridge linking the cultures of Spain, México, and the United States that successively shaped the region. His era laid the ranching and settlement patterns that still mark the Texas Gulf Coast today.
Alonzo Álvarez de Pineda
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In 1519 the Spanish crown sent Alonzo Álvarez de Pineda to trace the Gulf of Mexico coast in search of a water route to Asia. Over nine months he charted hundreds of miles of shoreline from western Florida to Veracruz—among the first European mapping of the Texas coast—before running afoul of Hernán Cortés and sailing north past a river likely the Rio Grande. Though he found no passage and likely never returned home, his map and report spurred the exploration that opened the Gulf to European colonization.