Colonel Henry Kinney, the founder of the city of Corpus Christi and the main landowner, donated a hill overlooking the shoreline and the Nueces River and probably a vista of woods and meadowland to the west, as the cemetery.
Due to "delays" the military funerals were held after sunset, with the services read by lamplight and three volleys fired over the graves.
Each family took care of its own area, showing up for all day meetings and dinner when they came to clear weeds and do any needed restoration.
Originally a military cemetery, Old Bayview is the final resting place of about eighty veterans of five wars who hail from fourteen different countries and twenty-six U. S. states.
Texans who fought on both sides of the Civil War are buried there and so are Henry Chapman and William Warfield, black Union soldiers who arrived with the Federal occupation.
Of black persons during that time when racial segregation was being legislated, some of the earliest buried having been slaves of white cemetery occupants, about forty are thought to lie there, the last interred in the 1980s.
Also buried here is a Buffalo Soldier, George Owens, who played a part in the Union army, and was honored with a historical marker in February, 2019.
Dr. T. Somervell Burke (1836–1891) was a Confederate veteran born in Mississippi who for many years ran the quarantine station at Port Aransas.
He was born in Poglow, Mechlenburg, Germany, studied engineering, learned four modern languages plus Latin in addition to his native German, and served in the Prussian army before immigrating.
In 1849 he came to Corpus Christi where he surveyed school lands for Nueces County, helped draft the City Charter and inserted the amendment requiring a ship channel to Aransas Pass.
He selected the site for and built a water tank to deal with droughts (drafting an ordinance to keep hogs out of it), and in 1853 surveyed the military road to Eagle Pass, Texas.
In the Confederate army he planned and oversaw the defense of Corpus Christi, which endured artillery barrages by Federal gunboats.
On a trip to Germany in 1849 he married Maria Augusta Emme (1827–1893), an aristocratic and wealthy girl who accompanied him to become a pioneer woman, albeit of the local elite.
From 1859 to 1860 he prospected gold in what's now Arizona and returned wealthy in time to command the local artillery battery as a Confederate major and to serve as a judge.
Historian Eugenia Reynolds Briscoe gives a fairly detailed account of this, beginning with the tightening of the Federal naval blockade in January 1862.
Under Lt. S. W. Kittredge Union forces took Port Aransas and Mustang Island in July, using the yacht Corypheus and steamship Sachem.
Not mentioned on the site are conflicts of Anglo and Hispanic settlers with Indians, usually Comanche or Tonkawa, and raids by outlaw gangs.
As late as 1942 Corpus Christi, A History and Guide noted that Benjamin F. Sotherville's gravestone showed damage from Federal artillery.
The Corpus Christi Daily Gazette for 22 April 1876 claimed that "dastardly acts committed by some ghoul"—apparently digging up plants—required an "ordinance attaching a severe penalty to this outrageous crime."
Editorials urged that this situation required a new burial ground and led to the opening of New Bayview Cemetery to which some remains were relocated.
The Weelly Caller for 19 May 1893 reported that Mrs. E. J. Kilmer, a local GAR member, had received fourteen tombstones she'd ordered for United States soldiers buried there.
White as well as black persons who remember the time may recall that the neighborhood was called "Harlem" and had a lively, nonsegregated nightlife.
[citation needed] West Broadway Street separated the cemetery from railroads that carried freight to the Port of Corpus Christi and from a wastewater treatment plant on a part of the Nueces River that served as a ship channel.
For a while maintenance may not have been routine, since in 1953 a family complete with dogs and rabbits in hutches was living in one corner of the cemetery, burning their trash on graves.
The problem must have been solved, because in 1957 Ms. Webb wrote that "Today the old military cemetery presents an appearance in keeping with its historical associations.
Grass and native trees, mesquite and Texas Persimmons, vines, and blooming shrubs lend an air of peace to the hallowed ground while the Stars and Stripes marking each veteran's grave flutter in the cool gulf breeze."
Decades of truck and railroad travel along West Broadway, the construction of Corpus Christi's harbor bridge and of I-37 over the previous fifty years and the traffic these and nearby Concrete Street Amphitheater caused damaging vibrations.
On 1 March 2001 the Caller-Times reported some of the damage and a plan by the Nueces County Historical Commission to engage in a detailed study as well as resrotation.
According to the newspaper this began when Rosa G. Gonzales was seeking the grave of a great-great-grandfather, which she did not find, and noticed that the Dayton soldiers had no markers.
No relatives of the steamboat disaster casualties could be located so a flag would be presented to Goldia Burroughs Hubert, a descendant of General Taylor who lived in Riviera, Texas.