United Veterans Burial Association honors fallen heroes at Alice Memorial Day ceremony

Families, veterans and younger residents gathered at Old Collins Cemetery to keep Alice’s military memory visible, as the United Veterans Burial Association marked its fourth annual Memorial Day ceremony with a focus on fallen heroes.

The gathering was held Monday at the cemetery, where the association has built a recurring tradition of honoring service beyond the holiday calendar. In a town where remembrance often travels by family name and cemetery plot, the ceremony linked older residents who have long known the burial ground with younger people seeing public tribute to military sacrifice up close.

Old Collins Cemetery itself gives the observance added weight. The burial ground has served Alice-area residents for more than 100 years. Frederic B. Nayer donated the land in 1903, when it was known as Alice Fraternal Cemetery, and the Alice Cemetery Association formed in 1925. Association members planted 100 oak trees there in 1952, and the cemetery now holds prominent citizens, military veterans, Texas Rangers and generations of community residents.

That history helps explain why Memorial Day at the site resonates so strongly in Jim Wells County. The cemetery is not just a resting place for the dead, but a record of the people and institutions that shaped Alice. On Memorial Day, the United Veterans Burial Association used that setting to place service and sacrifice back into public view, where families could remember relatives and neighbors could stand with veterans in a shared act of respect.

The county’s Veterans Service Office adds another layer to that civic memory. Located at 601 E. Main Street, Suite 110, in Alice, the office serves veterans, widows and dependents, and its mission statement says freedom is not free. That message matched the tone of the cemetery ceremony, which framed remembrance as both mourning and obligation.

The association has also kept veterans’ memory active at other times of the year. Its earlier observances in Alice have included Vietnam Veterans Day programming and a National Vietnam War Veterans Day celebration, part of a wider pattern of public tribute that stretches across the calendar. In that way, Memorial Day at Old Collins Cemetery was less a standalone event than another chapter in a local tradition of remembering service where Alice’s history is already buried in plain sight.