Duncan Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just passin' it along. Out on the edge of Corpus Christi, in Nueces County, there is a piece of ground that has been open to anyone who needed it for well over a hundred years. It goes by two names.

Some call it Duncan Cemetery. Others call it Flour Bluff Cemetery. Either way, the story starts in 1908, when Edward Sidnery Duncan and Minerva Ellen Duncan made a land purchase, and part of what they established on that ground was this burial place, open to the public from the very beginning.

Edward was born in 1868. Minerva in 1877. And the cemetery they helped bring into being would outlast them both.

Now, before those recorded dates, before the paperwork, there may have been burials here already. The marker is honest about that, careful about it. It says earlier burials may exist.

But the oldest grave with a documented record belongs to a woman named Mrs. N.F. Stigner, and her gravestone told a clear story: she died on January 3, 1909.

Told. Past tense. Because that gravestone was stolen.

Carried off, sometime in the years since. Gone. That detail sits there quietly in the marker text, and it deserves a moment.

Someone came to a cemetery and took a headstone. The name, the date, the only physical proof of a life recorded in this ground, just gone. And yet the record survives, because somebody wrote it down before the stone disappeared.

What remains here is more than one grave, of course. Veterans are buried in this ground. Men and women who served in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.

Generations of families who shaped Corpus Christi and Nueces County rest here, the kind of people whose names you find on old deeds and church rolls and the margins of local history. A cemetery open to everyone, named for a family who bought the land in 1908, holding the dead of a century of wars and a century of ordinary life. Duncan Cemetery.

Flour Bluff Cemetery. Same ground. All of it still there.

What the marker says

Also known as Flour Bluff Cemetery, this burial ground has always been open to the public. It was established in 1908 as part of a land purchase made by Edward Sidnery Duncan (1868-1940) and Minerva Ellen Duncan (1877-1921). Earlier burials may exist here, but records show that the oldest documented grave is that of Mrs. N.F. Stigner. Her gravestone, recording her January 3, 1909, death, was stolen many years ago. Veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars are buried here, as are generations of families who have contributed to the devepment of Corpus Christi and Nueces County. Historic Texas Cemetery-2000