DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker at Indianola Cemetery tells this story, and I'm just the one passing it along. Now, if you ever want to understand what a place has been through, don't read the history books. Walk the cemetery.
And the Indianola Cemetery — out here in Calhoun County — well, it does not whisper. It speaks plainly, and what it says is this: life on the Texas Gulf Coast in the nineteenth century was not for the faint of heart. Indianola was one of Texas' leading ports in that century.
Ships came in, goods moved through, people built lives. But the graves in this cemetery reflect the hardships those residents encountered, and they are many. The earliest marked grave belongs to a child.
William Woodward. His death came in 1852, a year when cholera and yellow fever epidemics were sweeping through Indianola. Think on that a moment.
The very first name someone thought to mark in stone was a child, in a year when the town was fighting off not one epidemic but two. Then came the Civil War. Indianola was occupied — Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, the whole grinding weight of that conflict passing through.
And when it was over, men from both sides were left behind in this ground. Enemies in life, neighbors in eternity. But the Gulf wasn't finished with Indianola.
Not by a long measure. The hurricanes came. Eighteen seventy-five — a storm that devastated the town.
And then, as if the first blow hadn't been enough, eighteen eighty-six brought another. Victims of both storms are interred right here. Two epidemics.
A war. Two devastating hurricanes. All of it written not in any ledger, but in the quiet rows of this cemetery.
Some places earn their history the hard way. Indianola earned every word of it.
What the marker says
Many of the graves in this cemetery reflect the hardships encountered by residents of Indianola, one of Texas' leading 19th-century ports. The earliest marked grave is that of a child, William Woodward. His death occurred in 1852, a year when cholera and yellow fever epidemics swept through Indianola. During the Civil War, the town was occupied by Confederate and Union soldiers, and men from both sides are buried here. Victims of the 1875 and 1886 hurricanes, which devastated the town, are also interred in this cemetery. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986