Category: Family

The Howard Cemetery: Storage for old souls and old sofas

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Such a peaceful, magical place. An appealing invitation to spend an eternity there. Hidden from cars traveling the Old San Antonio Road. Nestled in a thick cedar patch providing restful shade. Protected by a wall of stones quarried on the ranch and topped by jagged honeycomb rock.

It was a place I wanted to rest.

Before my father-in-law broke the news to me: the original Howard Cemetery deed restricted any increase in population in their cemetery to direct descendants and their spouses. I was crushed they would not accept the company of even their cousin Spencers. I considered leaving instructions for my ashes surreptitiously to be scattered among the graves.

Why would I want to end up somewhere uninvited? A spot so purposefully restricted to keep some late-arrival import, such as a Brennan, out?

After all, those who reside there are not mere Howards. They are Howard Howards – really Howardly – originally from King’s Stanley, Gloucestershire, England.

For the answer, refer to paragraph one.

But that temptation is gone.

After visiting the Howard Cemetery yesterday – no easy task – I particularly was struck by an article on the Herff Farm in today’s Rivard Report. The efforts of the Cibolo Nature Center to preserve the Herff farmhouse amidst Boerne’s explosive growth are so needed. The Herffs and the Howards were neighbors.

There will be no explosive growth in the Howard Cemetery because there are no direct descendants remaining anywhere nearby. When “Aunt Minnie,” Minnie Knox Spencer, born in 1883 in Galveston and only eligible by her marriage to Fitz-Alan Forester Howard (1878-1956), became a permanent resident of the cemetery in 1972, she left no direct descendants. I just missed getting to know her, much to my loss. Despite coming out of the Hutchings of Galveston and marrying into the Howard-Howards, Aunt Minnie evidently was down to earth. She could care less about money; she cared more for her goats.

The 280 acres of the Howard Ranch were divided among grand nieces, nephews and their children – meaning tracts as small as seven acres a piece, for which all were grateful. But that fragmentation eventually led to the demise of a bucolic tract of land.

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And the cemetery, although restful within its walls, is now an isolated oasis in a sea of concrete. Swallowed by Boerne’s growth. By people who, like many of us, have more stuff than they need. People who have so much stuff, they rent storage. And people with major recreational vehicles in need of a place to rest.

So now they rest next to the cemetery. The cemetery encircled by concrete and yellow tape. Like crime tape confessing to the concrete sins.

While the current owner was required to keep the cemetery, keeping the original main house – Ten Oak Hill Cottage – of John Howard Howard (1834-1894) was certainly not mandatory. But the owner of the Ten Oaks Storage Unit in Boerne did. Mercifully. There amidst the rows of metal sheds, it stands. Out of place, yet preserved.

A sliver of history that makes one mindful of the importance of the larger slice saved by the Cibolo Nature Center.

‘So Doth a Little Polly,’ sayeth this Lamar

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mockingalamo

In June of 1920 I received the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Mathematics and Economics, a title which, coupled to the name of Lucius Mirabeau Lamar the Third, was of such resounding grandiloquence as to bring from the assembled students faculty and families (who else would be there in the boiling muggy Texas sun?) a burst of applause embracing, I knew well enough, a component of irony. It did sound good, as some of the movie false fronts look good, but there was mostly air behind it.

From Shards by Lucius M. Lamar, 1968

And this before Lucius M. Lamar, III, (1898-1978) added a law degree.

It is not surprising someone so willing to self-mock would choose a conscientiously pretentious name for the protagonist in a pride-before-the-fall, the-grass-is-always-greener, be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable, So Doth a Little Polly, woven for his five-year-old-niece and seven-year-old nephew.

Jesus Francisco de Assisi Sensontle.

This tale of a San Antonio mockingbird did not bow to monosyllabic rhyming words first-graders could read. No, it was a vocabulary-stretching story rippling with multiple layers of bicultural meaning and accompanying music ranging from “Hinky Dinky Parlez Vous” to Handel.

Sensontle, or Don Sensontle as he preferred to be called, wintered on Alamo Plaza, convinced he reigned over all other feathered creatures. He believed his singing so awe-inspiriting he was “astonished at his own virtuosity” (Notes in the margin recommend the accompaniment of a toy flute here.).

One day a sparrow, Cecil, asked if Sensontle had read the recent news from Austin in the paper:

“A gentleman never reads,” replied Sensontle with dignity, being innocent of that clerical accomplishment.

“Perhaps not,” went on Cecil, ignoring the implication….

The news Cecil the sparrow was trumpeting was that the mockingbird had been proclaimed the State Bird of Texas.

Pompous pride over this tribute soon led to a downturn in Sensontle’s popularity among the birds of the plaza (pompous chords followed by a fast march).

Frustrated, Sensontle flew to a home on Zarzamora Street to visit his caged cousin, Maria Ysabel Dolores Soledad Sensontle, “a handsome and engaging young fellow, whose somewhat effeminate name had been bestowed by his captors under a misapprehension as to his sex.”

Yearning for an easy life, Sensontle negotiated to change places with his cousin for a year.

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A year later Maria returns and perches on the branch of a fig tree near his former cage. Sensontle desperately pleads:

“Kindly release me.”

“Come,” said Maria, “your morals have improved at the expense of your manners. You should ask no labor of me until I have got my wind.”

“I ask nothing save the fulfillment of your promise, which is a sacred duty you should perform at once, tired or not. Be quick, let me out!”

“Patience, cousin, patience,” soothed Maria.

And then.

And that’s the problem.

Twelve dried, yellowed, longer-than-legal-sized typewritten pages.

The end of the story is missing, scattered somewhere amongst the shards left in the wake of closing the Mister’s parents’ household. Lost. Along with copies of other “children’s” works produced by Lucius, including “Hardboiled Harry.”

We are hoping the Mister’s great-uncle passed the stories down orally to his own children and are mailing “So Doth a Little Polly” to his daughter tomorrow.

Please. Let us know if Sensontle lived to fly freely lording over the Alamo once again….

Older than Methuselah and larger than the whale that swallowed Jonah

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Growing up, we had an attic stretching the length of the house. When spring-cleaning was forcibly enforced, we three girls would take all of the things we could not bear to part with, virtually everything, up to some corner in the attic.

When my poor mother finally got ready to downsize, she logically assumed we would return for all the treasures she housed patiently for us through the years. But no. We wanted all of those things – my Shirley Temple doll and Barbies and those hoop-skirted formals of my oldest sister – but we wanted them in my mother’s house, not ours.

We are now going through mountains of papers, books and photos carefully retained for more than a century by the Mister’s side of the family. Our generation now is supposed to assume guardianship, but, in our case, we already have downsized. The next generation has not yet, if they ever so choose, upsized.

I am the last person who should ever go through remnants from the past. I cherish every scrap of paper offering clues about past lives. I wander through old photos more slowly than Moses found his way out of the desert.

Take this Bible, for example.

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It’s older than Methuselah. Okay, not quite that old. It was published in Philadelphia in 1831.

This is not your ordinary King James I Bible. In addition to the Old and New Testaments, it ecumenically includes the Apocrypha, all translated out of the original tongues. There are “marginal” notes and references; an alphabetical index of every character mentioned; tables of scripture weights, measures and coin; historical maps; and numerous engravings. The cover is gold-embossed, and the Florentine lining almost makes our granite countertop seem pale. It dates from a time when historical engravings could even bare breasts.

Of course all of these things add up. They add up to a full four-inch-thick volume, rather weighty to slip subtly onto any bookshelf.

The original owner bore a name from one of the most brutal fire-and-brimstone books of the Old Testament, Zephaniah. This book describes a vengeful god making men plant vineyards, but not allowing them to drink a drop of the wine they produce (Chapter 1: Verse 13). The Lord in this book was fierce:

I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumbling-blocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord.

(Chapter 1, Verse 3)

Reading that made me worry that the Mister’s third great-grandfather might have been rather frightening. But Zephaniah Turner Conner (1807-1866) appears to have been named after his Aunt Sallie’s husband, Zephaniah Turner (1779-1855). Zephaniah Conner and his wife Louisa Ann Godwin (1815-1891) were descended from families who’d been in Virginia for several generations, but the newlyweds headed out to Macon, Georgia, after their marriage and increased the population there by producing at least 11 children, according to their Bible. Among the great family names bestowed upon these children is a personal favorite, Granville Cowper Conner (1837-1900).

Although Zephaniah Conner served as a colonel in the Civil War, he allowed his daughter Virginia (1839-1931), the Mister’s second great-grandmother, to marry a man born in Massachusetts. Serving as a Lieutenant in the Georgia cavalry easily made up for the original birthplace of William Allis Hopson (1836-1873). The couple took their vows in Christ Church in Macon, Georgia, in 1866. The Bible, with a ticket from the 1871 Georgia State Fair serving as a bookmark, was handed down to them.

Their daughter Georgia Hopson (1870-1928) married Lucius Mirabeau Lamar, Jr. (1866-1931), a family with a set of remarkable names as well, in Christ Church in 1894 before heading to Mexico. Perhaps she lugged the weighty Bible with her on that rugged journey.

The Bible then found its way to San Antonio to the home of the Mister’s maternal grandmother, Virginia Lamar Hornor (1895-1988).

And now the Family Records contained in this tome covering half my desk when open taunt me to dig deeper into all of their backgrounds. Some day I will, but I have a whole cemetery of people whose memories I currently am excavating.

I am closing the cover now, wondering who will assume the role as its caregiver. Maybe this Bible that has traveled so far needs to find its way back to Macon.