Solis Cemetery
La Feria, Cameron County, Texas
Marker Inscription
JUAN JOSE SOLIS, GRANTEE OF PORCIÓN 107 IN STARR COUNTY AND FOUNDER OF EL SOLISEÑO, MEXICO, WAS PATRIARCH OF THE SOLIS FAMILY IN THIS AREA. HIS GRANDSON FRANCISCO (1801-1876), AND HIS WIFE ANASTACIA RIVAS DE SOLIS (b. 1808), WERE EARLY RESIDENTS OF POINT ISABEL AND BROWNSVILLE, LATER SETTLING IN LA FERIA. THEIR SON LAZARO (1840-1904) AND HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW YSABEL CANTU (b. 1849) BOUGHT ABOUT 5,000 ACRES OF THE LA FERIA GRANT IN JULY 1898, ESTABLISHING THE SOLIS RANCH. WITHIN ITS BOUNDARIES THE MEN AND THEIR FAMILIES RAISED CATTLE, HORSES AND GOATS AND GREW SEVERAL CROPS. WHEN LAZARO DIED SUDDENLY WHILE VISITING FAMILY IN POINT ISABEL, HIS BODY WAS BROUGHT BACK TO THE RANCH FOR BURIAL, A COMMON PRACTICE IN THAT ERA. HIS IS THE FIRST BURIAL IN SOLIS CEMETERY, ALSO KNOWN AS SAN FRANCISCO CEMETERY. IN 1905, LAZARO’S WIDOW FRANCISCA (1853-1911) PARTITIONED LAZARO’S LAND AMONG HERSELF AND HER SEVEN CHILDREN. LAZARO AND FRANCISCA’S HAND-LETTERED CONCRETE SPANISH-LANGUAGE GRAVE MARKER IS SIGNED “JUAN, MATEO AND GUMERCINDO DEL MÍSMO APPELÍDO” ([SONS] JUAN, MATEO AND GUMERCINDO OF THE SAME LAST NAME). IN 1929, SOLIS CEMETERY WAS SURVEYED AND PLATTED AND A PUBLIC ROAD WAS DEVELOPED TO PROVIDE ACCESS. THE CEMETERY IS AN ACTIVE FAMILY BURIAL GROUND OF MORE THAN THREE ACRES. SPARSELY SHADED BY MESQUITES AND OTHER NATIVE TREES, THE CEMETERY HAS MORE THAN 300 GRAVES, MOST OF WHICH HAVE MARKERS OF WOOD, STONE, BRONZE OR CONCRETE. SOLIS CEMETERY IS THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF KNOWN AND UNKNOWN PEOPLE OF HISPANIC, ANGLO AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN DESCENT, AND AS MANY AS FIVE GENERATIONS OF THE SOLIS FAMILY. VETERANS OF WORLD WAR II AND THE KOREAN WAR ARE BURIED HERE. THIS BURIAL GROUND IS TESTIMONY TO GENERATIONS OF LOCAL RANCHING AND FAMILY TRADITIONS. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This active family burial ground grew out of the Solis Ranch, established in 1898 when Lazaro Solis and his brother-in-law Ysabel Cantu bought some 5,000 acres of the La Feria Grant to raise cattle, horses, and goats. When Lazaro died in 1904 he became the cemetery's first burial, and within a year his widow partitioned the land among their children. Surveyed and platted in 1929, the mesquite-shaded ground now holds more than three hundred graves spanning five generations and people of Hispanic, Anglo, and African American descent.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the deep roots of Mexican-descent ranching families in the Rio Grande Valley, a heritage that predates and outlasted the region's twentieth-century transformation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The lower Rio Grande Valley is one of the oldest continuously settled corners of what is now the United States, and its land tenure runs back to Spanish colonial times. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Spanish crown organized settlement along the river into long, narrow tracts called porciones, each with a strip of river frontage — a system meant to give every ranching family access to water. Families granted those porciones put down roots that would outlast empires, surviving the shift from Spanish to Mexican to Texan to American rule without ever leaving the land.
Throughout the nineteenth century this was ranching country: cattle, horses, and goats grazing the brush country of mesquite and native grass, worked by families whose presence long predated the surveyors and railroads. Towns like Point Isabel and Brownsville grew on the coast and the border, but much of life happened out on the ranches, bound together by kinship and custom.
By the turn of the twentieth century, change was coming — irrigation, farming, and new arrivals would remake the Valley in the early 1900s. But the deep structure of the place had been laid down generations earlier by families like the one this cemetery remembers.
People & events
The Solis story begins with Juan Jose Solis, grantee of Porción 107 in Starr County and founder of El Soliseño in Mexico — the patriarch from whom the family in this area descends. His grandson Francisco and Francisco's wife Anastacia Rivas de Solis lived first at Point Isabel and Brownsville before settling at La Feria, tracing the family's slow move up the river country.
It was Francisco's son Lazaro, together with his brother-in-law Ysabel Cantu, who put down the roots this ground grew from. In July 1898 the two men bought about five thousand acres of the La Feria grant and established the Solis Ranch, where their families raised cattle, horses, and goats and grew several crops. When Lazaro died suddenly in 1904 while visiting relatives at Point Isabel, his body was carried home to the ranch for burial — the common practice of an era when a family buried its own on its own land. His was the first grave in what became Solis Cemetery, also known as San Francisco Cemetery.
Within a year, Lazaro's widow Francisca partitioned his land among herself and their seven children, keeping the ranch in the family's hands. The couple's own grave marker, hand-lettered in concrete and in Spanish, was made and signed by three of their sons — a homemade monument that speaks of devotion more plainly than any purchased stone could. In 1929 the cemetery was surveyed and platted, and a public road was built to reach it.
Its place in the American story
Solis Cemetery is a rebuttal to the idea that American history moves only from east to west and from newcomer to native. Here the founding families are of Mexican descent, their claim to the land older than the state of Texas, and the cemetery testifies to a heritage that predates and outlasted the Valley's twentieth-century transformation.
It is also, in its own quiet way, a portrait of the American mixture. More than three hundred graves hold people of Hispanic, Anglo, and African American descent, known and unknown, and among them lie veterans of World War II and the Korean War — Valley sons who served the nation their families had lived in through several flags. A single burial ground of a few mesquite-shaded acres carries five generations and more than one people's story.
That is what makes places like this matter to the national memory. The big narratives of ranching, land, and migration are abstractions until you stand where a specific family lived, worked, and buried its dead across a century. This ground makes the abstraction concrete.
If you visit
This is an active family burial ground of more than three acres, sparsely shaded by mesquites and other native trees — so come with the quiet respect any working cemetery deserves. Notice the range of markers: wood, stone, bronze, and concrete, side by side. Those materials are a social history in themselves, the store-bought monuments and the handmade ones telling you which families had means and which had only their own hands and hearts.
Seek out the older concrete markers especially, the ones lettered by hand in Spanish. There is nothing like a homemade grave marker for collapsing the distance between you and the people who made it; you are reading the literal handwriting of grief and love from more than a century ago.
On a drive through the lower Rio Grande Valley, a stop here reframes everything around it. The farms and towns you pass sit atop a much older ranching world, and this cemetery is one of the places where that older world is still visible, still tended, and still receiving its own. Let it slow you down.
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
- · Lazaro Solis
- · Francisca Solis
- · Ysabel Cantu
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Town of La Feria
La Feria, TX
This land was surveyed in 1777 as part of Spanish grants to Don Juan Hinojosa and José María Balli, ancestors of the priest for whom Padre Island is named, and by the 1790s the ranch hosted a fairground—giving La Feria its name—for fiestas, horse racing, and sport. After the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Balli heirs had their Texas title confirmed, and in 1850 cattleman Nathaniel White opened Anglo ranching here. The town of La Feria was platted under its old name in 1906 and grew into a trade center for the farming country of the Rio Grande Valley.
The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation System
Mercedes, TX
In 1905, at the dawn of the Lower Rio Grande Valley's transformation into an agricultural powerhouse, developer B. F. Yoakum gathered investors to turn arid brushland into irrigated farmland. Their company bought a quarter-million acres and built the townsite of Mercedes as its headquarters, and by 1908 pumps were lifting river water into a growing web of canals. Within a dozen years the system had swelled to three main canals and five pumping plants, and it passed to public water districts in 1930 that still serve Valley farmers today.
Immanuel Lutheran Church
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Sent to plant Lutheran congregations in the Rio Grande Valley, the Rev. E. J. Moebus helped organize Evangelical Lutheran Emanuel Church at Mercedes in October 1910. The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation Company donated a trackside lot, and the first building was dedicated in May 1911. The congregation later moved to Washington and West Third streets, built anew in 1929, and took the name Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran in 1945.
Battle of La Bolsa
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In 1859 and 1860 Juan N. Cortina led a series of raids on Texas settlements along the lower Rio Grande, sparking the clashes known as the Cortina Wars. On February 4, 1860, Cortina's raiders met Capt. John S. "Rip" Ford's Texas Rangers at La Bolsa Bend, where the Rangers beat back an attack on the riverboat Ranchero as it steamed down from Rio Grande City. Cortina slipped across into Mexico, where he later rose to become a general in the Mexican Army.