By J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The messy past of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum grounds is coming to the surface, and it’s getting in the way of the future.

For 40 years it has been known as Fort Fisher, a tree-shaded riverside park that centers around Waco’s most popular museum. Until recent years, the 35-acre site also housed a major RV park and was the grounds of the Brazos River Festival.

Scott Fagner/Staff illustration (ENLARGE)

Waco's historic First Street Cemetery grounds once extended to nearly the Brazos River, encompassing land now occupied by the Fort Fisher park, including the city-owned Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. An ongoing museum expansion project has resurrected concerns about the number of bodies still buried in the park.

It now appears Fort Fisher may sit atop hundreds of deceased Wacoans, including rich and poor, Confederate soldiers, a World War II veteran and a former slave who became a Texas legislator. Burials range from 1856 to 1966, archives show, contradicting city leaders’ speculations that the cemetery was abandoned since the early 20th century.

More than 160 bodies have been found along the path of a utility line that is being dug toward the new Texas Ranger Company F building and education center behind the city-run museum. The excavation project has delayed the opening of the facilities by several months. Up to 200 more graves might be discovered along the line, says James Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology division.

The city got a court order in August 1968 for the “disinterment and relocation of the interred bodies and/or grave markers” from the eastern side of the neglected city-owned First Street Cemetery to make way for Fort Fisher. The more recent, long-planned expansion of the Ranger complex was based on an assumption the graves had been substantially cleared.

That assumption turns out to be contradicted not only by the ongoing exhumations of bodies but by historical records and interviews with those in charge of the 1968 cemetery relocation project.

Moving headstones

The city of Waco has records of some 153 gravestones moved as part of the project but no records for relocated bodies. Likewise, newspaper accounts from March and September 1968 mention relocating gravestones, not bodies.

In fact, what happened in 1968 was mainly a project to move tombstones from one side of the graveyard to another, and only a few graves were exhumed, two former city officials say.

Alva Stem, who managed the relocation project as city parks and recreation director, said the old cemetery had been severely neglected, with weeds grown head-high and broken stones scattered all around. Finding graves to match the stones would have required digging up the whole tract, he said.

“We moved all of the headstones that were viewable,” said Stem, who served the city from 1950 to 1988. “I don’t think they knew exactly where the bodies were with the headstones scattered around like they were.”

Stem remembers digging up and relocating a few graves, including a family mausoleum, with the assistance of licensed undertaker and Texas Ranger Museum board chairman James LeBlond.

His recollections echo those of David F. Smith, Jr., who was assistant city manager at the time and became city manager in 1970. Smith remembered the mausoleum and a few bodies uncovered during site work for the museum itself. He said the total number of excavations might have been 20 to 25.

“When we built the museum, we found very few graves,” he said. “We moved graves where we knew there were bodies. We tried to be very respectful of bodies that we did find.”

He remembers a crew finding a skull while digging a foundation for one of the outbuildings for the museum.

“They called and said, ‘We’ve uncovered a grave,’ ” he recalled. “We told them just to put them back in the hole and cover it up.”

He said officials considered it more respectful to leave the grave undisturbed than to move it.

Asked whether any other Ranger buildings might be built on graves, he said he couldn’t be sure, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

Not moving the bodies

A former city employee, Melvin Wood, said he worked on the crew that relocated scores of gravestones from the lower area closer to the river to the area now known as First Street Cemetery, just off University-Parks Drive.

Walking through the cemetery last week, he pointed out stones he said he personally moved, such as that of Armstead Ross, 1821-1883, a former slave of Waco pioneer Shapley Prince Ross.

“We didn’t move any bodies,” Wood said. “We only moved the headstones.”

He said that on a couple of occasions, workers scooped up a couple of shovelfuls of dirt, put them in wooden boxes and buried them under the relocated headstones.

Bruseth, the Texas Historical Commission official, said he considers the Fort Fisher site to be a cemetery, despite the removal of gravestones.

“What you’re saying is in keeping with the archaeological evidence,” he said in an interview with the Tribune-Herald. “There’s little evidence of relocation of graves. . . . This is still a cemetery, and our recommendation is not to disturb it anymore but rededicate it as a cemetery.”

He said the state would discourage further expansions of the Texas Ranger Museum into the old cemetery area and would closely monitor upcoming projects to expand the museum’s Knox Hall and extend the riverwalk past the museum.

He said the state might allow a few graves to be moved for those projects but probably not large numbers.

Lacking information

Assistant City Attorney Annette Jones said there’s not enough information to know how many graves existed in 1968 or how many were moved.

“You’re trying to put the burden on us to show that graves were moved, and that’s an impossibility,” she said. “Outside of digging up the cemetery, no one is ever going to know how many there were.

“Forty years ago some decisions were made, rightly or wrongly,” she said. “Where we are now is in the process of trying to remediate that in accordance with state law.”

City staff would have approached the museum expansion project differently if they had known what they know today, she said. Still, museum officials acted in good faith by hiring an archaeologist to survey the site before work began on the education building and Company F headquarters.

“We had no idea what we’d find,” she said. “That’s the reason you hire an archaeologist, because you don’t know.”

Ranger museum officials declined to comment for this story on advice of the city attorney’s office. In past interviews, they have said they thought that many of the graves had been cleared in 1968 but that they hired the archaeologist because they suspected some remained.

When American Archaeology surveyed the 8,000-square-foot site for the new buildings in August 2006, the crew found remains of masonry structures and some bone fragments, but no graves, and it appeared the graves had been cleared, Jones said.

Striking bone

Work began on the buildings in February 2007. Then, in May 2007, a city crew began digging a utility line along a path that had not been surveyed but stopped when it hit bone and reported the incident to city officials. The city and Texas Historical Commission developed a procedure for exhuming, analyzing and reburying graves in a perpetual care cemetery.

American Archaeology, which won $437,000 in contracts last year to do the work, was fired in February after city officials complained the team was understaffed and was taking too long.

City officials are now looking for a new archaeologist but have no idea how much the remaining work will cost.

Cloudy history

Meanwhile, historical research indicates the scale of past burials at Fort Fisher is much greater than city officials imagined in 1968.

Even if the graves for the 153 known markers had been located and moved back then, it would be a fraction of the total.

The total number is impossible to estimate because the cemetery apparently developed without mapped graves and many headstones have rotted away or vanished. Historical accounts support recent archaeological findings that bodies were buried on top of earlier burials, sometimes three deep.

According to research by American Archaeology, a man named George Edwards deeded 5 acres to the city and 2 acres to the Masons for cemeteries in 1852. Maps and deeds show the cemeteries were expanded in the next few decades and joined by an adjacent International Order of Odd Fellows cemetery. The three cemeteries at some point became known collectively as the City Cemetery or First Street Cemetery. Together, those cemeteries comprised the whole area known today as Fort Fisher and First Street Cemetery.

An 1883 Waco Examiner article estimated the First Street Cemetery had several thousand graves with missing markers and mentioned an undertaker who could identify some 2,500 burials.

The burials included numerous Waco pioneers and Confederate veterans. They also include the grave of Shepherd Mullens, 1828-1871, who was born a slave and became a McLennan County commissioner and state legislator during the Reconstruction era.

The burials continued in the 20th century, including some prominent people, as numerous stones moved from the Fort Fisher area show. For example, one belongs to restaurateur and Confederate veteran Samuel Forsgard, who was born in Sweden in 1828 and died in Waco in 1912.

Another relocated stone belongs to Robert Brown, who lived from 1878 to 1906. He was a member of the Knights of Tabor, an elite black Masonic order associated with the Underground Railroad. Crews with American Archaeology have also found a body buried with a Knights of Tabor medal.

Meanwhile, records from a single black funeral home, Boykins, show about 425 bodies interred at the First Street Cemetery between the 1920s and the mid-1960s. Most of those burials were in the 1920s and ’30s, but 25 were in the 1950s and ’60s.

That includes World War II veteran Tedell Reese, who lived from 1917 to 1960 and was buried in a plot that is now covered by a garage with a concrete foundation, according to a city grave survey map from 1968. A 1962 volunteer survey of the cemetery showed that he had a military marker and a metal marker above his grave.

The same survey identified the grave of Mrs. Talsey Evans, who died June 1963 but lacked a stone.

“You could see the wood of her casket from the ground,” volunteers noted in their report.

Smith, the former assistant city manager, said any burials during the 1960s would have been illegal. In fact, he said he found one funeral home attempting to bury people during the relocation process.

“They kept burying people with no headstone,” he said. “They’d just dig and bury. I told him that if I caught him doing that again, he’d be going to the pen.”

Permission to build

The city of Waco went to district court in 1968 to get permission to clear the Fort Fisher area. The city published notice of the project in May 1968 and heard no responses from descendents of the deceased. On Aug. 1, 1968, Judge Carl Anderson decreed the city of Waco would “proceed to disinter and reinter said graves or the contents therein and remove and relocate markers within said cemeteries.”

By that time, work at Fort Fisher was already well under way. Work on the building began in December 1967, and it was dedicated in October 1968.

A Waco Tribune-Herald article on March 27, 1968, describes ongoing work by city crews to move stones from the Fort Fisher area to the area now known as First Street Cemetery.

“Because of the span of years, there would be virtually no trace of remains underground,” the article says. “The moving process will consist mainly of relocating a sample box of dirt and the headstone.”

A follow-up article on Sept. 19, 1968, describes continuing work to piece together gravestones and reset them but does not mention exhumations. Another article in October of that year indicates that Barsh Construction was already at work on a $245,642 project to build park facilities.

Jones, with the city attorney’s office, and Bruseth, with the Texas Historical Commission, say it’s unclear whether the city’s work at the time complied with the court order and with state law. Jones noted that the Texas Antiquities Act was passed several years later, putting much stricter requirements on cemetery relocations.

Bruseth said many cemetery removal projects around the state in the 1960s era were incomplete by modern standards.

“What happened in 1968 might have been a legal process, but from a moral or ethical standpoint, it’s not any good,” he said. “There should be nothing built on top of a grave. It’s just not respectful for the sanctity of that place. Even a sidewalk or a parking lot is not in keeping with that.

“We’re kind of stuck now,” he said. “We’re in a situation where we’ll all have to work together to exhume burials. But for any future construction we need to consider it carefully in terms of, is it needed? And what’s down there now?”

Brad Willis, a Waco dentist who has served on the Texas Ranger Museum library board and has raised funds for the museum, said he thinks the expansion was a mistake.

“I have mixed loyalties here . . . but to me, the thing is a cemetery,” he said. “You’re putting a building in a cemetery, and you’re going to spend a lot of money to continue. You’re going to dig up more people. This may sound crazy, but it might be better to tear (the new buildings) down and not build it there.

“That’s not a popular solution,” he added. “But to me it’s sad that the Texas Ranger Museum staff and the city of Waco have not recognized this as Waco’s first burying ground.”

jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752