Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery has to say, and it's a story that starts, as so many South Texas stories do, with a town being drawn on paper before it was ever a town at all. The Capisallo Town and Improvement Company platted the town of Mercedes in 1907. Just a plan, at that point.

A grid of streets and lots waiting for life to show up and fill them in. Well, life did show up, and so did the Church. The Oblate Provincial Council up in Austin went to that same company and asked them to set aside a site for a Catholic church.

The company said yes. And in February of 1909, Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church was dedicated right here in Mercedes. Now, a church and a community go together, and wherever there is a community, there is, eventually, a cemetery.

In December of that same year, 1909, a woman named Carmen Nava Garza became the first person to be interred on this site in a marked grave. That detail matters. A marked grave.

Someone made sure she would be remembered. The Capisallo Company, in 1910, gave four acres, including this very site, to the Brownsville Diocese. The cemetery took its name from the parish church that had called this ground into being.

Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery went on to serve those who were not buried on private ranches outside Mercedes, which in that era and that landscape was no small thing. People needed a place. This was the place.

And it still is. More than two thousand three hundred forty-one marked sites and fifty-six unmarked ones, the cemetery keeps right on serving Mercedes. Carmen Nava Garza's marked grave stands somewhere among them, the first of many, a quiet reminder that someone, from the very beginning, believed these lives were worth remembering.

What the marker says

The town of Mercedes was platted by the Capisallo Town and Improvement Company in 1907. The Oblate Provincial Council in Austin requested that the company provide a site for a Catholic church, and Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church was dedicated in February 1909. In December of that year, Carmen Nava Garza was the first to be interred on this site in a marked grave. The Capisallo Company gave four acres including this site to the Brownsville Diocese in 1910, and the cemetery was named for the parish church. Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery served those who were not buried on private ranches outside Mercedes. With more than 2,341 marked and 56 unmarked sites, the cemetery continues to serve Mercedes. (2000)