San Leon Cemetery Committee

To secure the restoration and preservation of the burial grounds, and to provide new landscape as well as architectural features that meet the needs of generations to come.

The Cemetery Committee is established to advise on matters relating to the operations and administration of the San Leon Cemetery including policy issues, management practices, and service needs.

The first recorded burials in the cemetery occurred during the 1890s when the town was called North Galveston, but according to several historic sources, Amos Edwards was buried on his estate after drowning in Galveston Bay before the Texas Revolution was won. The estate was near the point and not too far from the cemetery location. In the early 1900s Ben C. Stuart wrote several articles that mentioned the Edwards family burial site and how the tombstone near the edge of the bay could be seen for years before finally disappearing as neglect and erosion ate away the shoreline. The old Edwards estate also became the possible resting-place for some remains of several Mexican soldiers who were killed during the Battle of San Jacinto. A doctor who was living on the Edwards land prior to 1840 brought their bodies or parts of their skeletons, depending on who told the story to San Leon. Charles Hooten mentions this in his book, St. Luis Isle, published in London in 1847. According to San Leon old-timers and Saunders descendants, near the turn of the century T. W. Saunders found a skeleton in the high bank of shell gravel between the cemetery and the point. Tatters of clothing adhered to the skeleton and three Spanish coins were found in the garments of the rotted cloth. It was never know if this was the body of Amos Edwards who drowned in Galveston Bay before 1837, the body of a privateer from Lafitte's town of Campeche on Galveston Island, or one of the Mexican soldiers brought from the battlefield at San Jacinto .

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