Old Town Cemetery

🏛️The era

Indianola is one of the great ghost towns of the Texas coast. In the nineteenth century it was a busy port on Matagorda Bay. Immigrants landed there, and goods moved inland toward the growing settlements of central and western Texas. For a time it was one of the most important harbors in the state.

In the 1840s it was a main entry point for a large wave of German immigrants. Many came through an organized colonization society, landed on this shore, and then moved inland to found or settle towns such as New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. Some stayed on the coast and helped build the port and the surrounding county.

Indianola's fortunes ended with the sea. Powerful hurricanes struck the town in 1875 and again in 1886, and after the second storm it was largely abandoned. Today little remains except scattered traces, markers, and cemeteries like this one.

👥People & events

This cemetery sits on a raised ridge near the beach, one of three burial grounds that served the port. Its oldest surviving grave marker belongs to James Chilton Allan and is dated 1851. Around it lie some of Calhoun County's earliest settlers, including people who arrived in that first great German migration of the 1840s.

The most famous person buried here no longer has a headstone. Angelina Eberly died in 1860 and is remembered as the heroine of the Texas Archives War. In 1842, when Austin was the capital of the Republic of Texas, men sent by President Sam Houston tried to quietly remove the government's records. Eberly, who kept a boardinghouse in Austin, is credited with firing a cannon to alert the town. Local residents then pursued the wagons and recovered the archives, which helped keep Austin in the running as the capital.

Like many stones here, hers has been lost to storms and vandalism over the years. So she lies in this ground without a marker, on a coast far from the Austin street where she became a legend.

The marker was placed during the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986, 150 years after independence, to make sure these people and this place were not forgotten.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Indianola was one of the Gulf gateways through which immigrants entered America. The German settlers who landed here shaped central Texas culture in ways you can still see in its towns, churches, farms and food. Their story is part of the larger nineteenth-century wave of European immigration that transformed the United States.

Angelina Eberly's story is a vivid reminder that ordinary citizens, including women who seldom appear in official records, sometimes shaped major political events. The Archives War was a fight over where the government of Texas would sit, and a boardinghouse keeper helped settle it.

The town's destruction also belongs to a larger American story: the power of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. Indianola's fate is one of the starkest examples of a thriving port erased by storms, and a lasting lesson about building on a vulnerable coast.

🧭If you visit

Expect a quiet, windswept place. The cemetery sits on higher ground near the water, and part of its power is the contrast between that calm and the bustling port that once stood here. Many graves are unmarked or lost, so walk gently and respectfully.

Look for the older surviving stones, and remember that Angelina Eberly is somewhere in this ground even though her headstone is gone. Taking a moment to think of her here, far from her famous night in Austin, is part of the experience.

The cemetery fits naturally into a drive around the Indianola area and the nearby coast, where other markers tell the story of the lost port, its German immigrants and its hurricanes. Bring water and sun protection, and check the weather first. This is a coastal site, and the Gulf still sets the terms here.