Phillips Memorial Cemetery - Texas City, TX - Worldwide Cemeteries on Waymarking.com

The remainder of a concrete wall and a few headstones are all that remain of Phillips Memorial Cemetery.

Two signs fill in some of the missing pieces, while the end of this story can be found 3 miles southwest in Mainland Memorial or Gold Bond Cemetery.

PHILLIPS MEMORIAL CEMETERY
A Historic Texas Cemetery

The Phillips Memorials Cemetery began with the death of Kneeland Britton in the 1870s. It was situated on the Kneeland and Sylvia Britton land next to the Galveston, Houston & Henderson Railroad. Priscilla Britton Phillips and her husband Albert Phillips retained the Britton land behind the cemetery. Many pioneers of the 1867 Settlement, a freedmen community, were buried here. The founding families were very close and their children married into the Bell, Britton, Caldwell, and Hobgood families who were Black Cowboys who trailed cattle up the Chisholm Trail. These pioneers established their settlement on the 320 acres of land that Judge William J. Jones set aside for purchase by freed slaves after the Civil War.

The 1900 Storm brought new families from the City of Galveston and after the turn of the twentieth century the industrial growth at Texas City brought new jobs to the rural agricultural area. This cemetery was the only African American cemetery on the Galveston County mainland for decades.

In 1927, the State of Texas rerouted Highway 6 to the cemetery's side of the G, H&H tracks. The new highway went through the oldest section of the cemetery, and tragically the bodies were taken from their caskets and placed in a common grave behind the latest grave sites. Later this highway was renamed to State Hwy 3. In 1991, during an additional highway expansion, the Texas Department of Transportation workers exposed more graves in the highway right-of-way. Archaeological field crews from Texas A&M University worked on the site locating and removing the remains of bodies and caskets until 1992. This time the remains of forty-four graves were moved to a burial site in the Mainland Memorial Cemetery. A granite monument with associated meditation benches were erected in honor of the relocated individuals.

The history of the 1867 Settlement community and this cemetery compiled through oral interviews with descendants of the pioneering families.

Through research of existing records and oral histories of Settlement family descendants, a list of burials in the historic Phillips Memorial Cemetery has been compiled. This list is not complete and any additional information can be added to the Phillips Memorial Cemetery, 1867 Settlement District files at the Galveston County Historical Commission.

Located in Mainland Memorial Cemetery a monument stands for the unknown remains found and removed during highway construction. By chance, I came across this monument in October 2016.

It reads: