The powerful story of the grave in the middle of a Texas neighborhood’s road
The Chisme is a culture series looking at San Antonio’s fun facts, useless trivia, and, of course, local chisme of varying degrees.
The oddity that is a random grave along your route comes with quite the story, naturally. Such is the case for Hollie Tatnell, a Black woman whose final resting place can be found in the middle of a road in Hearne.
According to researchers, Tatnell was born into slavery in 1859 in Texas and passed away in 1911. At the time of her death, Tatnell was buried in a reported slave burying ground that became an African American cemetery after slavery was abolished. In 1947, decades after Tatnell’s death, the cemetery was uprooted for the sake of real estate development after the land was purchased. The bodies of the buried had to be exhumed and their loved ones forced to place them elsewhere, but Tatnell’s family fought back and refused to accept the decision. Her children said they wanted her to remain where she was since it was located close to where she grew up.
Sadly, the developers went ahead with the project and constructed a median around Tatnell’s diagonal grave. To be specific, her grave lies in the middle of Wheelock Street in the small town located about 26 miles northwest of College Station. A placard at her gravesite reads, “To the memory of ‘Our Mother’ Hollie Tatnell,” which her children put up with her original headstone that reads “Come Ye Blessed.”
In 2007, the state recognized Tatnell’s grave as a Historic Texas Cemetery, so it also has a Texas Historical Commission sign. It reads, “This single grave serves as a reminder of the area’s early African-American community and of the sanctity of burial grounds.”
