Japanese,Mexican graveyards hurt by neglect, vandalism By Dale Robinson March 22, 1989 El Campo Leader News

A graveyard may convey different thoughts to different persons at different times. Often a graveyard makes one nostalgic and lonely for a friend or loved one. Sometimes a graveyard summons up feelings of wonder and thoughts about what the person whose name is on the stone did in life. Always a cemetery conveys a history of its community. However, time, neglect and vandalism can take a toll on these sacred and historic sites. Such has happened to at least two historic cemeteries in Wharton County. The one in which there has been the most desecration, is probably the most historic of the two. It now has only one broken stone to remind us of an era long past. On that marker is a Japanese character that evidently was the name of the deceased and other pertinent data about his or her life and death. Several other stones, marking lives of colleagues, neighbors or kin are now missing. The cemeteries are located on a ranch that was once part of the Pierce Ranch, now owned by the Burito brothers. Leroy �Sonny� Bahner, Ferguson;s ranch foreman for 32 years, guided the Leader-News to the Japanese graveyard. Bahner knows every inch of the six thousand acres that once belonged to the Mackay oil man and rancher. �There were five or six grave markers here when Johnny owned the place,� Bahner said. Souvenir hunters or collectors have ravaged the site. Access is by dirt roads around plowed fields and then on foot through briars, weeds and thick underbrush. It lays near the banks of a creek in a livestock-shaded place. Someone had to work to get the heavy stones out of this place. It was a warm afternoon and Bahner warned to watch for rattlesnakes. The former ranch foreman and horse trainer said the graveyard was that of a group of Japanese farmers who owned some 2,000 acres there on which they grew rice shortly before the turn of the century. They had a system for bringing water up from the Colorado river and lifting it to the higher fields for the rice,� Bahner said and added some of the equipment they used was still evident when he lived on the place. Like the grave markers, the equipment is no longer there. The Japanese farmers, worked their land, buried their dead and moved on. They sold the place to Bordon and moved to Chicago, Bahner said. The other graveyard was not so hard to get to. Nor did it seem to be desecrated. But it has truly fallen into disreputable condition. There is no longer a fence around the graveyard and although the farmer plows and mows around it, cattle have free run of it. Weeds and secondary brush have grown thickly over the area. Graves are caving in. Markers are broken and scattered. The place is in total disrepair. Apparently, the site was once a graveyard for Mexican workers who lived and worked on the ranch. Nearly all the surnames are Spanish. H.C. Aquilos Rest de la nina Macdalena Villerreal que el 29 de Mayo 1916, YTCI 15 de enero, 1948 sus aflicicidos. Padres Manuel Villarreal y Ma N.D.F.� reads one of the longer markers. Another reads �Louisa M. Davila, Juneo 21, 1888, Dic 10 1940.� Most of the stones speak loudly of the deceased and bereaved religion. �Con Cristo En El Cielo,� (with Crist in Heaven) pronounces Martina Garcia�s marker. �Requerdo� (remembered), it says simply. The hardship of ranch life around the first of this century is reflected in the length of lives noted on most of the markers. Clara Beltran lived from 1895 until 1929, a brief 34 years. Petrus de Rivera lived only from 1905 to 1931. B. Guzman was born in 1905 and expired in 1938. The earliest birth noted was that of Juan Flores, born during the American Civil War, 1864. He lived to be an old man of 58, having died in 1922. The two small pieces of real estate may be in shambles, but they still mark sacred and historic ground in the history of Wharton County.