Oakwood Cemetery

Jan 5

Written By alanah cooper

Site Brief:

Founded: 1839

Location: Austin, TX

Additional name(s): N/A

Affiliate group(s):

Save Austin's Cemeteries

History:

Founded in 1839, and containing over 23,000 burials within 40 acres, Oakwood Cemetery is Austin's oldest municipal burial ground. The first interment was that of an enslaved African American man who was killed while being brought into Texas by enslavers. Early burials were in the western section of the cemetery, near the Navasota gate. When the cemetery was platted in 1866, it included the area segregated by race and socioeconomic status. The Historic Colored Grounds lie on the north side of the cemetery’s main road, appearing as a flat green space with a sparse scattering of 300 gravestones. The monuments exist in various states of disrepair, some slightly visible above the grass line, many face down, and others sinking beneath the topsoil. Records indicate that thousands of named individuals are buried within this area and subsections, but no map exists as to the exact location of the burials. Additionally, early sexton’s ledgers reveal entries of hundreds of unnamed individuals, noting only their race or enslaver’s name, further denying the opportunity for descendants to trace ancestry or burial information.

The Historic Colored Grounds hold the remains of most of the cemetery’s African American burials, both free and enslaved peoples, many of whom settled in Austin’s renowned freedom colonies after the Civil War. Among them are civil rights leaders, educators, cultural icons and religious figures influential on local, state and national scales. Some of these individuals have monuments, but most do not. The City of Austin believes that Austin’s historic cemeteries remain vital for the community to remember its segregated past and how the city has changed since its founding. The segregated grounds of Oakwood Cemetery serve as a site of, and memorial to, the ongoing advancement of civil rights, in recognition of the struggle for Black equity over the past two centuries. The individuals buried in the Historic Colored Grounds were subject to segregation and institutional racism in life and death. This is evident in the poor keeping and absence of historical records compared to the rest of the cemeteries’ burials.

Constructed in 1914, the Oakwood Cemetery Chapel is a visitors’ center that sits within the Historic Colored Grounds section of the cemetery. Originally constructed as a mortuary chapel for on-site funerals, the chapel was used as a sales office in the 1940s and later as a space for the grounds crew. A 2017 renovation revealed that the chapel was built atop 38 gravesites. After extensive community engagement to determine next steps, archaeologists exhumed and analyzed the burials. They identified the remains of 21 adults, 15 children or infants, and 1 person of indeterminate age, all of whom have been reinterred with an interfaith service to the west of the chapel.