Brushwood Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it along just the way it reads. Now, every cemetery has a story, and some of them start even before the ground itself was ready. Brushwood Cemetery was established as a municipal burial ground for the town of Chapin, the place folks now call Edinburg, in 1913.

That was five years after the town's founding, so the community had been around a little while before it set aside this particular piece of earth. The earliest known burial here was that of Antonia Hernandez de Ramos, who died in 1913, the very year the cemetery opened its gates, so to speak. Right from the start, this ground was carrying the weight of a community finding its footing.

But here's a thing that'll give you pause. Brushwood doesn't only hold the stories of people who came after 1913. Older graves, dating all the way back to 1898, were relocated here from El Granjeno Cemetery, near the town of Mission.

Those souls traveled one last time to rest in this place. So the ground holds more history than the founding year alone might suggest. Today, more than a thousand graves are located here.

And if you were to walk among those tombstones, you'd be reading the names of a whole world. Anglo, Spanish, German, and Irish surnames, all together in the same soil, documenting the diversity of peoples that helped build Edinburg and the other communities in the vicinity. That's the quiet testimony this cemetery offers, not in words spoken aloud, but carved in stone, right there in Hidalgo County, waiting for anyone willing to stop and read.

What the marker says

Brushwood Cemetery was established as a municipal burial ground for the town of Chapin (now Edinburg) in 1913, five years after the town's founding. The earliest known burial here was that of Antonia Hernandez de Ramos, who died in 1913. Older graves dating to 1898 were relocated here from El Granjeno Cemetery near the town of Mission. More than 1,000 graves are located here. Tombstones bear Anglo, Spanish, German, and Irish surnames and document the diversity of peoples that helped build Edinburg and other communities in the vicinity. (1992)