Fairview Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Fairview Cemetery in Galveston County. It starts, as so many Texas stories do, with a burial. February 1900.

A five-month-old boy named Victor Nordhem was laid to rest on a piece of ground that Alison J. Adams had bought for an individual burial plot. Now, most stories end at a grave.

This one was just getting started. In 1908, Adams deeded additional acreage to the Fairview Cemetery Association, and what began as one family's sorrow became a community's sacred ground. Over time, more than twelve hundred burials have been recorded here, marked and unmarked both, each one a life that crossed through this corner of Texas.

The markers themselves tell you something about who these people were. Concrete, marble, granite, cypress wood. Humble and grand, side by side, the way it tends to go in a place where everybody ends up equal.

Decoration Day was observed here, the holiday that would later become Memorial Day, a day for music and speeches and the quiet work of decorating graves, of remembering. And there are veterans interred at Fairview, dozens of them, men and women who served and then came home to this ground. There are also settlers and descendants from the Japanese Colony that was begun at Webster in 1903, a piece of Texas history that doesn't always make it into the history books but makes it into this cemetery, into this soil.

Twelve hundred stories, maybe more. Victor Nordhem. Alison J.

Adams. Veterans. Colonists.

Settlers. Fairview holds them all, and as the marker puts it, the cemetery conveys many diverse and interesting stories of the past. I'd say that's about right.

What the marker says

Five-month-old Victor Nordhem was laid to rest in February 1900, on land bought by Alison J. Adams for an individual burial plot. In 1908, Adams deeded additional acreage to the Fairview Cemetery Association. Decoration Day, later Memorial Day, was a day for grave decoration, music, speeches and activities. More than 1200 marked and unmarked burials have been recorded. Features include markers made of concrete, marble, granite and cypress wood. Dozens of military veterans are interred here, as well as settlers and descendants from the Japanese Colony begun at Webster in 1903. The cemetery conveys many diverse and interesting stories of the past.