St. Rose Cemetery
Beeville, Bee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This historic African American burial ground is associated with two congregations organized in the 1880s. Many buried here were members of Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church or Jones Chapel United Methodist Church. Some burials took place prior to the site's official dedication as a cemetery. The earliest known burial, of former slave Nancy Williams, dates from 1901. Land for a community cemetery for African Americans was officially deeded in 1921. Among the prominent individuals interred here are Mose Lott and Allen Canada, who built the first Beeville schoolhouse for African Americans. Several veterans of conflicts dating back to World War I are also buried here. The St. Rose Cemetery Association organized in 1970 to care for this sacred site. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2008
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground grew alongside two Black congregations organized in the 1880s — Bethlehem Missionary Baptist and Jones Chapel United Methodist — and the earliest known grave, that of former slave Nancy Williams, dates to 1901, before the land was formally deeded as a cemetery for African Americans in 1921. Among those resting here are Mose Lott and Allen Canada, who built Beeville's first schoolhouse for Black children, and veterans reaching back to World War I. A community association formed in 1970 to tend the sacred site.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a lasting record of a Black community's founders, teachers, and soldiers, written in the ground they consecrated when few other institutions would hold their memory.
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Related people
- · Nancy Williams
- · Mose Lott
- · Allen Canada
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jones Chapel United Methodist Church
Beeville, TX
Organized in 1888 as Jones Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, this Beeville congregation first worshipped in a schoolhouse while circuit-riding ministers rotated among churches by stagecoach and horseback. In 1889 members built a sanctuary on land Capt. A.C. Jones donated to three formerly enslaved men serving as trustees, and many of the church's charter members were themselves formerly enslaved. Still on its original site, the congregation remains active in Beeville's African American community and its Juneteenth celebrations.
Lott Canada School
Beeville, TX
Black education in Bee County began in 1876 in Stephen Canada's store, then a small frame schoolhouse, chartered by the county as "Colored Community School Twelve." A larger frame school followed on North Burke Street, where principal J.R. Lockett matched the offerings of the town's white schools until fire destroyed it in 1929. With help from the Chicago-based Julius Rosenwald Fund, a brick school with four classrooms and an auditorium opened in 1931, named for carpenters Mose Lott and Allen Canada — serving until integration closed it in 1964.
Lott Cemetery
Goliad, TX
Acquired in 1896 and soon renamed for a local African American family, Lott Cemetery holds the graves of trail drivers, cattle-industry workers, and everyday families whose modest wooden crosses and sculpted obelisks trace the ups and downs of the local economy. When the 1902 tornado destroyed a nearby Methodist church and neighborhood, several dozen victims were buried in a communal grave along its eastern edge. Among those resting here are more than thirty veterans, two centenarians, and a man known only as "Bingo," raised by a prominent cattleman's wife.
Fannin Street United Methodist Church
Goliad, TX
Founded in 1872, Fannin Street United Methodist Church was one of the earliest African American congregations in Goliad County, established after emancipation as freedpeople who had worshiped alongside their enslavers formed churches of their own. The small country church—steeply gabled with a four-sided cupola and a Cincinnati-cast bell—weathered a string of catastrophes, most terribly the 1902 tornado that destroyed the building and killed fifty parishioners. Rebuilt in 1903 and struck again by lightning in 1976, the congregation endured, living out its motto that "the church is not the building; it's the people."