Waco’s Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum is getting an expensive history lesson as it expands into what officials now understand is a cemetery crammed with hundreds of graves.

The Waco City Council last week agreed to pay an archaeologist as much as $437,000 to move human remains from the path of waterlines to the new Texas Ranger Company F headquarters and education center. The new Ranger facilities, which stand behind the main museum and complement it, are set to open in January.

About 95 bodies have already been exhumed since the first remains were found this spring, and it’s possible the final tally will double that figure, Texas Ranger museum officials say. The archaeologist’s crews are picking and sifting through tons of dirt to locate the bones, then running a forensic analysis on hem and preparing them for eventual reburial in other cemeteries.

The scale of the burials came as a surprise to the popular city-owned museum and to the Texas Historical Commission, which protects historic grave sites. In fact, commission officials say they might have nixed the expansion plans had they known how many remains required removal.

“Had we known, we probably would have had some concerns,” says James Bruseth, archaeology director at the Texas Historical Commission. “We should be very cautious about any future development out there. That area should basically be a cemetery.”

City officials say they assumed the site was cleared of most human remains in 1968, when museum planners got a court order to find and relocate the graves to First Street Cemetery.

“What we thought happened is that when they came in here to relocate the graves, anything that was buried was moved,” says Christina Stopka, deputy museum director.

That belief was reinforced during the recent expansion, when an archaeologist reported that no bones lay where the new buildings would be located, even though traces existed of five previously relocated grave sites.

“There’s a rumor going around that we built over bones, but that’s not true,” Stopka says. “We went down 7 or 8 feet and didn’t find any.”

The bones were discovered as the city began construction of a new 8-inch water line, after the buildings were well under way. The city of Waco contracted with American Archaeology of Lampasas for $100,000 to relocate the burials and do a forensic analysis of the bones.

But as work progressed, the price tag changed. Archaeologists discovered they were in the midst of a densely packed boneyard, with burials as deep as 9 feet.

At the site last week, Stopka pointed out a pit where archaeologists exhumed three skeletons from different eras, stacked one atop another.

“This is where the cost starts to go up,” she said. “Just when you think you’re through, you find more burials. It’s very labor intensive and tedious. They’re down there with tiny shovels and trowels and picks. All of this soil has to be sifted through.”

Museum officials say moving 180 bodies at the cost of $437,000 is a worst-case scenario, and they hope the areas yet to be exhumed aren’t as densely packed with bodies.

Stopka estimates more than 300 burials exist on the site but that most will remain undisturbed.

The site’s history complicates the picture. It’s a stone’s throw from the First Street Cemetery on University-Parks Drive, a clearly marked graveyard dating back about 150 years.

By contrast, the grave sites between the First Street Cemetery and Lake Brazos are not marked or mapped. Contractors have tried to survey the grave sites with ground-penetrating radar, but some of the remains have been disturbed and can only be detected when they’re dug up.

Old bones

It appears the area was active in the 1890s through the 1920s, perhaps as an informal pauper’s cemetery, museum officials say. Only two footstones and one unmarked headstone have been found.

However, Stopka says some of the ornate hardware found on the caskets suggest not all the sites were paupers’ graves. Nor was the cemetery restricted to one race. An analysis of the skulls shows that some were black, some were white, and some were Hispanic or Asian.

Much of the site would have flooded regularly till the 1950s, and in the 1940s a trash incinerator operation on the banks of the Brazos buried garbage there, disturbing many of the graves. Debris from the 1953 tornado was dumped on the site, including many bricks and a load of broken bottles from the storm-struck Dr Pepper bottling company.

By the time the city of Waco moved to redevelop the site in the late 1960s, it had become overgrown with brush.

“We’re not dealing with a pristine area that’s fenced in like the First Street Cemetery,” museum director Byron Johnson says.

Left out in the open

Controversy erupted in July when Gholson resident Richard Thompson took several large human bones from the construction site, claiming they had been left exposed in a dirt pile and that he was trying to protect them. He later released them to authorities, but Johnson says Thompson’s actions compromised the integrity of the archaeological work.

Police haven’t decided whether to charge Thompson for illegally entering the fenced-in site and disturbing the bones, Johnson says. It’s unlikely the museum will press charges, he says.

Stopka says she believes the bones were deliberately planted in the dirt pile by a disgruntled construction worker trying to embarrass the museum. She says it’s unthinkable that archaeological crews and museum workers would have left large bones jutting from a dirt pile.

“There might have been some small bones that washed out, but there’s no way femurs could have been sticking out of that pile,” she says.

Museum officials say the remains will be treated respectfully and buried in individual coffins, with markers, at a ceremony with local clergy presiding.

Any artifacts found with the bones will be buried with them. That includes bits of cowboy boots, suspender buckles, a dental plate, a Mercury dime and a white glass jar of Ingram’s Milkweed Cream.

Stopka says archaeologists have found several seashells at the grave sites, including oysters, mussels and whelks. She says shells at one time were commonly buried with corpses for symbolic purposes, especially in African-American culture.

Bruseth, of the Texas Historical Commission, said museum officials are doing a good job of exhuming and handling the remains. However, the commission wants to ensure the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum’s future expansion plans don’t disturb yet more of the dead.

Johnson says there are no further plans to expand in the area of the grave sites. The museum’s master plan calls for expanding Knox Hall into an area close to the current building, where any graves would probably have been cleared. A more long-range project involves building close to the river, but Johnson doubts any graves exist there.

Meanwhile, the bones that are relocated will be fully documented and maintained in perpetual care at a city cemetery, Johnson says.

“I look at this as if these could have been some of my own ancestors,” he says. “If these were my relatives, I would want it to be done this way.”

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

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