Texas droughts unearth cemeteries, Mississippi floods bury them

Hurricane Irene roared up the East Coast last August, leaving a wide and varied path of destruction.

In New Jersey at least one woman drowned in her car, Virginia experienced the second largest power outage in the state’s history, in Delaware a tornado tore off the roof of a house and in Rochester, Vermont a river flooded its banks and swallowed a large section of a graveyard. “A terrible and sad situation,” read one local report. “Homes are destroyed, so are roads and bridges and even a cemetery…the final resting place for Rochester residents.” Much of the nation has seen weird weather lately, putting a crimp on lives and also affecting the dead. Some cemeteries have been submerged by flood waters, in other cases a lack of water has brought old graveyards back to life.

Flooding along the Mississippi River over the summer popped three caskets out of the ground in the cemetery of a 150 year-old Baptist church in Yazoo City, Mississippi. “It was just shocking,” a church deacon with a mother and a sister buried in the church cemetery told a local paper. The flood inundated the entire cemetery with two and a half feet of water, leaving only the tops of the headstones showing. Even a concrete vault was set afloat. The unearthed bodies were brought to the state medical examiner’s office, which soon became full, forcing officials to keep bodies in a refrigerated truck.

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Just to the west, in Texas, the story has been drought. Water levels in area lakes have dropped by more than a dozen feet, unearthing surprises across the region. Along the Oklahoma border, a town flooded in 1944 when the Red River was dammed to make Lake Texoma has reemerged and at Falcon Lake, along the Rio Grande, on the Mexico border, a century-old church has reemerged. Other objects reappearing from Texas lake beds have included, prehistoric skulls, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to have contained the graves of freed slaves. At Lake Georgetown, near Austin, fishermen found what seems to be the skull of an ancient American Indian. The discoveries have attracted interest from local historians and also looters. At Lake Whitney, south of Fort Worth, more than two dozen looters were arrested for removing Native American tools and fossils that experts believe could be thousands of years old.

In Bluffton, a small town in the center of the state, the past 12 months have been the driest on record. The receding waters of nearby Lake Buchanan have revealed the concrete foundations of a two-story hotel, scales of an old cotton gin and concrete slabs from a Texaco gas station that also served as a general store. A handful of graves have appeared too, including the cracked marble tombstone of one Johnny C. Parks, who died October 15, 1882, two days before his first birthday.

But usually it is a flood that unearths old graves, and also puts people in new ones. In Terrell County, Texas in June of 1965, thunderstorms dropped nearly a foot of rain in only a few hours. Sanderson Canyon Creek, typically dry, turned into a furious 15-foot high wall of water. It struck the town below without warning, wrenching homes from their foundations, destroying businesses, washing out bridges and laying waste to five miles of Southern Pacific railroad track.

Entire families were swept away, others barely survived. A railroad brakeman named Charles Horsely was stranded atop an apartment for three hours and watched helplessly as the raging waters engulfed the town. Another brakeman nearly drowned in a futile attempt to save a family of children, clinging to a collapsing motel roof. “It just started crumbling and went over and everybody was going to die and I couldn’t help them,” said the brakeman. Amazingly, one of the children actually survived. “I grabbed a tree, but there was a snake on it and I let go,” he later told a reporter at the hospital. “I went under 5 times, maybe 10 times. I thought  I was going to die.” He didn’t, but unfortunately all his siblings did.

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Mixed in with the new bodies were old ones that washed out of Sanderson Cemetery. These bodies were later recovered and, to eliminate additional health hazards, mass-buried in a bulldozed pit.