{"id":349831,"date":"2026-06-25T11:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/349831\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T11:28:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:28:12","slug":"olivewood-cemetery-houston-history-restoration-and-whats-at-stake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/349831\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivewood Cemetery Houston: History, Restoration, and What\u2019s at Stake"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Margott Williams first arrived at her grandfather\u2019s burial ground<\/a> along White Oak Bayou, it was hidden behind a wall of unchecked vegetation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no parking lot,\u201d Williams says. \u201cNo fence, no sign, nothing to tell what it was. The bushes were well above our heads. We were in the middle of the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWelcome to Olivewood,\u201d her mother said.<\/p>\n

Williams was bewildered. All she could see was a brush forest off a washed-out dirt road. Without her mother\u2019s certainty, she would not have recognized it as a cemetery at all. The pair was unable to move more than a few feet off the road due to the thicket.<\/p>\n

Shocked at the state of disrepair, Williams began seeking information about the cemetery\u2014both who was buried there, and who was responsible for its upkeep. She would learn that Olivewood is the oldest incorporated<\/a> African American cemetery in Houston, established in 1875, only 10 years after Emancipation reached Texas. It is the resting place of some of the city\u2019s most prominent founders: men like Richard Brock, a formerly enslaved man who bought the cemetery\u2019s land and later became one of Houston\u2019s first Black aldermen; Rev. Elias Dibble, the first Black minister ordained in Texas, who founded one of the city\u2019s oldest Black churches; and J. Vance Lewis, born enslaved, was buried there as one of the first Black lawyers in Texas.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A headstone of a woman who was formerly enslaved and lived 115 years.<\/p>\n

Within a single generation, the people interred here had gone from enslavement to building Houston\u2019s earliest Black institutions\u2014and using them, in part, to find their lost loved ones. \u201cDuring slavery and right after Emancipation, people were looking for family members that had been torn apart\u2014especially children,\u201d says Williams, now the co-founder of the Descendants of Olivewood, Inc. \u201cThey\u2019d place articles in the newspaper, use the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau, establish communities, and look for their people. This cemetery is a statement of their right to read and write, to be a community, and to organize.\u201d<\/p>\n

Home to more than 400 official family plots, Olivewood\u2019s 5.5 acres holds an estimated 5,000 people. Though largely neglected, \u201cthis was no \u2018poor man\u2019s cemetery,\u2019\u201d writes Antwanysha Johnson in an official Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission document<\/a>. \u201cIt held some of the most beautiful statuary in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, by the time Williams first visited in 2003, Olivewood\u2019s enormous 10-foot obelisks and towering concrete angel had vanished beneath decades of abandonment and floodwater-fed overgrowth. Meanwhile, roughly two miles southeast, Houston\u2019s first white cemetery, Founders Memorial Park, sat pristine. Funded by the Daughters of the American Revolution, it was immaculately restored for its centennial in 1936. Back at Olivewood, the burial ground of Houston\u2019s Black founders was left to sink into the woods, unseen and unmaintained.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kept thinking, \u2018Somebody should really take care of Olivewood,\u2019\u201d Williams says. Her search for Olivewood\u2019s conservator grew more fervent, and she began visiting city officials, county offices, and the appraisal district. \u201cThey said they didn\u2019t know anything about it.\u201d No one seemed to be able to tell her who was responsible for the cemetery\u2014or, more curiously, who owned it. More than 5 acres in Houston proper had been abandoned so completely that no one could say who legally possessed the land.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Olivewood Cemetery holds more than 100 years of history and is the burial grounds for some of the city’s earliest Black leaders.<\/p>\n

In 2004, the City of Houston\u2019s legal department stated that Olivewood was \u201cclassified as private property,\u201d and therefore not the city\u2019s responsibility. The deeds to the land<\/a> were lost to time; the only traceable ownership led back to the 21 dead incorporators buried in the cemetery itself.<\/p>\n

Williams was still unable to visit her grandfather, and she had grown fed up with waiting. She called her oldest brother. \u201cHe had a lawnmower and a weed eater. I bought myself a swing sickle,\u201d she says with a laugh. \u201cI was out here sickling through plants and brush over my head. I don\u2019t know what we thought we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

After hours of work, they barely made a dent\u2014none of the cemetery\u2019s landmarks were visible. The pair returned several times. Roughly a month into the project, Williams\u2019s brother called it quits. \u201cI\u2019m not doing this anymore,\u201d she remembers him telling her. The weeds would grow back, but Margott didn\u2019t give up. She kept returning with her simple sickle, hacking away.<\/p>\n

Her efforts didn\u2019t go unnoticed. Charles Cook, who previously found the cemetery after his own machete-powered forays in 1993, joined Williams\u2019s restoration efforts at Olivewood, where his great-grandmother was buried, too. In 2005, Williams and Cook co-founded the Descendants of Olivewood\u2014a nonprofit dedicated to \u201crestoring, preserving, and maintaining\u201d the grounds. Community organizer Trevia Beverly and Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, then a city councilmember, began sending out volunteers to help restore Olivewood.<\/p>\n

Garcia also connected Williams with residents who had grown up playing in the cemetery or had attended the nearby Harper School. \u201cGenerations of families went there,\u201d says Williams\u2014her mother, aunt, and uncles among them. \u201cThe kids played in the cemetery and cut through to school on a bridge that connected across the neighborhood,\u201d she says\u2014before I-10 was expanded.<\/p>\n

Over time, the children who loved the cemetery became the adults who saved it. Volunteers cleared brush, hauled out debris, and slowly uncovered headstones that had been buried for decades. On one occasion, a gentleman with a brush hog\u2014a heavy-duty rotary cutter\u2014cleared a path for Williams and the other volunteers. \u201cThat was the first time I got to see the angel. The first time I got to see the lions. The first time I could see where my grandfather was buried,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thanks to the Descendants of Olivewood Cemetery, history and headstones are now visible.<\/p>\n

One volunteer day at a time, Olivewood began to look like a respected burial site. Monuments were visible. Families long separated were reunited, and stories were unfolding. Williams gestures to a simple headstone that belongs to a woman born into slavery. \u201cA 12th-generation descendant emailed me, wanting to honor her. Through mapping, we located where she was, and he laid a flat stone in her memory,\u201d Williams says. \u201cWe are literally reuniting families across generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Descendants of Olivewood became the official caretakers of the property in 2008, maintaining a cemetery still legally owned by those buried beneath it and protected by their living relatives. In 2023, it received the strongest protection in its 148-year history when the Houston City Council designated it a Protected Landmark and Protected Archaeological Site\u2014making demolition illegal.<\/p>\n

Few Black cemeteries in the US have ever received that kind of legal protection. Burial grounds beneath the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s campus<\/a> and a Tallahassee golf course<\/a> have been paved over and sold for profit. Historian Ryan K. Smith writes<\/a> that a Black burial ground in Richmond, Virginia, was \u201cactively destroyed.\u201d And in Bethesda, Maryland,<\/a> advocates say construction crews are still uncovering human remains at a self-storage site built on what was once the Moses African Cemetery.<\/p>\n

No one knows exactly how many sites have been lost. No federal or state agency has ever conducted a comprehensive count. However, in 2022, Congress passed the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, which funded efforts<\/a> to locate and document surviving sites.<\/p>\n

Still, no statute can suppress the laws of nature. Following extensive damage and flooding from Hurricane<\/a> Harvey, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Olivewood one of the\u00a011 most endangered places in the US<\/a> in 2022. Olivewood shared the list with sites like Camp Naco, an Arizona outpost tied to the all-Black Buffalo Soldier regiments, and Selma\u2019s Brown Chapel AME Church, a Civil Rights Movement landmark\u2014a reminder that the places holding Black history are disproportionately endangered.<\/p>\n

These days, natural disasters are more common. \u201cWe\u2019re having I-10 overflow events\u2014water floods [that are] 10, 20 feet high,\u201d she says. When Hurricane Beryl hit in 2024, it toppled trees and brush, filling areas that volunteers had already cleared. \u201cOne of our board members came out and said you could canoe from Olivewood over to Studewood Park [after the storm],\u201d Williams says. The cemetery had become a swamp, with water and debris so deep they could swallow headstones. The image was reminiscent of her first visit to Olivewood: \u201cYou couldn\u2019t see through any of it,\u201d Williams recalls.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Descendants of Olivewood Cemetery are now looking over the burial grounds, ensuring that its history and legacy are visible.<\/p>\n

As storms bring the brush back and the floodwaters continue to rise, the future of Olivewood is both hopeful and uncertain. Twenty years ago, Williams began with a single sickle, but the work looks much different now. It involves talking to donors, securing funding, and networking. \u201cWe rely on these things because the technology and laws have changed so much,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

One thing remains constant: a people who built institutions out of what little they had left their names and history in this ground. The least the living can do is keep them visible.\u00a0\u201cThe dead depend on the Descendants of Olivewood,\u201d Williams says. \u201cIt\u2019s up to us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Margott Williams first arrived at her grandfather\u2019s burial ground along White Oak Bayou, it was hidden behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-349831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}