Shiner Colored Cemetery
Shiner, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In February 1898, Nathan Austin, J. H. Hannah, Paul Mitchell and William O’Neal, trustees of the Shiner Colored Cemetery Association, bought 1.2 acres from Adolph and Emilie Hohertz for $100. They established a burial ground for Shiner’s African American citizens on the east side of the city cemetery, to the right of and nearly in front of the main gate. The June 2, 1910 edition of the Shiner Gazette reported the death and burial of J. H. Hannah in the Shiner Colored Cemetery, and also reported that a recent scholastic census showed African American children comprising 20 percent (52 of 259) of Shiner students. The cemetery was bordered by a wire fence, and by the 1940s all the plots had been used. The cemetery was often overgrown and in disrepair, and being at the lower end of a field, drainage was often a problem when it rained. In 1947, the Shiner Cemetery Society agreed to move burials and gravestones to a new site about two miles south known as Blue Bonnet Hill Memory Garden. Historic grave materials, including gravestones of concrete, granite, marble and metal, were moved along with remains. The oldest marked grave at Blue Bonnet Hill is for Thomas Mitchell, who died in November 1899. The Shiner Colored Cemetery now has the appearance of an open field which blooms with wildflowers each spring. However, not all burials were moved, and several unmarked graves were left undisturbed. The cemetery remains sacred ground and a precious record of generations past.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In February 1898 four trustees of the Shiner Colored Cemetery Association bought 1.2 acres to establish a burial ground for the town's African American citizens, set beside the city cemetery. Newspaper accounts recorded burials here and noted that Black children then made up a fifth of Shiner's students. By the 1940s the plots were full and the low-lying, often-neglected ground drained poorly, so in 1947 remains and gravestones were moved to a new site, Blue Bonnet Hill Memory Garden—though not every grave was relocated, and several unmarked burials remain.
Why it matters
Segregated cemeteries like this one bear witness to the lives of African American communities under Jim Crow and to the care their descendants took to honor them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the very end of the nineteenth century, the American South lived under the hardening rules of segregation. In the years after Reconstruction, laws and customs separated Black and white citizens in nearly every public sphere — and that separation followed people even into death. Across Texas and the wider South, African American communities buried their own in grounds set apart from the white cemeteries.
This marker records how one such community answered that reality: not by waiting to be given a place, but by buying one. In February 1898, four trustees of a cemetery association purchased just over an acre so that Shiner's Black citizens would have a dignified resting place of their own. It was an act of self-determination in an age designed to deny it.
The context here is the ordinary, grinding fact of Jim Crow — a system that reached into schools, streets, and graveyards alike. Against that backdrop, the founding of this cemetery was a community insisting on its own dignity in the one place where every family, sooner or later, must be provided for.
People & events
The founders have names, and the marker keeps them: Nathan Austin, J. H. Hannah, Paul Mitchell, and William O'Neal, trustees of the Shiner Colored Cemetery Association, who together paid one hundred dollars for the ground in 1898. They laid it out beside the city cemetery, near the main gate, and gave their community a place of its own.
One small newspaper item, from June of 1910, opens a window onto their world. It reported the death and burial of J. H. Hannah — one of the very founders — in the cemetery he had helped establish. The same notice recorded that Black children then made up a fifth of Shiner's students, 52 of 259, a plain statistic that testifies to a settled, growing community raising its families in this town.
But the ground itself was hard on the dead. It sat at the lower end of a field, so rain drained poorly and left it wet, and it was often overgrown. By the 1940s every plot was full. In 1947 the decision was made to move the burials and their gravestones — concrete, granite, marble, and metal — about two miles south to a new place called Blue Bonnet Hill Memory Garden, where the oldest marked grave, that of Thomas Mitchell who died in 1899, still stands. Yet not every grave was moved. Some unmarked burials were left where they lay, undisturbed.
Its place in the American story
Segregated cemeteries are among the most eloquent records of Black life under Jim Crow, precisely because they were so often built by the community itself. Where public institutions excluded African Americans, people organized associations, raised the money, held the deed, and cared for their own — and the cemetery became a lasting expression of that independence and love.
The fate of this ground is also a national pattern. Across the country, Black burial grounds were too often placed on the least desirable land — low, flood-prone, at the margins — and then left underfunded and neglected, their histories at risk of being lost. The poor drainage and overgrowth this marker honestly describes are part of a story repeated in countless towns, and so is the later effort to recover and honor what remained.
That some graves were never moved gives this place its deepest meaning. An open field that blooms with wildflowers each spring still holds people whose names may no longer be marked but whose lives were real. To treat that ground as sacred, and to set a marker so it will not be forgotten, is part of a broader American reckoning with the Black histories that segregation tried to keep at the edges of the map.
If you visit
Come expecting a field, not a graveyard, and let that be the point. Where you might look for rows of headstones you will find open ground that turns to wildflowers in spring — and beneath it, the marker tells you plainly, unmarked graves that were never moved. The quiet here is not emptiness.
Stand at the marker and read the four founders' names slowly. They bought this acre for their community in 1898, and knowing that the man whose 1910 burial made the local paper was one of them ties the whole story to this exact patch of earth. It asks for a moment of respect more than anything else.
This is sacred ground, and the way to visit it is gently. Do not go looking for something grand to photograph; go to remember that a community once cared enough to buy and tend a place of its own, and that people rest here still. A few minutes of attention is the tribute the marker was raised to invite.
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
- · Nathan Austin
- · J. H. Hannah
- · Paul Mitchell
- · William O'Neal
- · Thomas Mitchell
Themes & tags
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