Camptown Obituaries

     Compiling the Camptown Cemetery Census is a tricky process, at best.  

     There are some clear indications of who are buried there - the extant grave markers.  Most of these have been added to the census, though some, such as that of Robert S. Sloan were simply overlooked in earlier iterations of the census.  The marker is prominent and hard to miss, but by sheer dint of poor editing he was overlooked  in my earlier attempts at compiling the census. 

     There are also some problems with even with markers, such as the grave of Karl Schneider, who is not only not black and did not even live in Brenham, but rather in Millheim, in Austin county.

     An additional problem with Schneider's grave is that he also has another marker in the Millheim cemetery, although this is a cemetery which was not established until several years after his death. The mystery of his two graves remains one that is yet to be solved. 

     Fortunately, there exists another tool for establishing that a person has been buried in Camptown Cemetery - obituaries.

     The marker for Waterman Bynum is one of the more outstanding early markers in Camptown Cemetery, a grave which clearly spoke of the deceased as being a prominent man of some means.

(Photography courtesy of Amy the Spirit Seeker)

     An obituary for Bynum was found early one in the digital newspaper archives of The Portal to Texas History, an absolutely invaluable source of material for researching the cemetery.

 (Brenham Weekly Banner, December 8, 1881)

     There is some very important information about Bynum presented here - that he seemed to have a store in Camptown, had unlimited in Galveston (very important for a merchant of the time), was a city alderman and that his funeral had been attended by the mayor and other council members.  This vastly expands our understanding of the importance of Camptown and the cemetery in the black community.  But there were even problems here as well, no the least being his first name.  It is Waltman on the grave, but Waterman in the article.  There is also the matter of the condition of the obituary itself, which cuts out some of the important details.  Another was the date of the newspaper article.  It does not match the date of Bynum's death, and it becomes clear from reading other articles on in the same paper that this was not the correct date of the paper.  

     At the time this article was first found, it was the only copy available.  Since then the Portal to Texas History has expanded it's digital collection of Brenham papers, and a more complete copy of the obituary is available.  The practice of the Brenham Weekly Banner was to copy reproduce entire articles from papers of the previous week, so those empty spaces can now be filled in.

(Brenham Daily Banner, June 29, 1881)