Del Rio cemetery district ties four historic burial grounds together

Four contiguous cemeteries, spread across about 36 acres on Del Rio’s west side, still read like a social map of a border community that grew from frontier settlement into something more layered and more divided. The cemetery district is a stitched-together record of who built the city, who worshipped together, and who was separated in death.

A west-side district that grew with the city

The Del Rio Cemeteries Historic District brings together Masonic Cemetery, Westlawn Cemetery, Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery and Saint Joseph Cemetery, all tied visually and historically by the same landscape. Italian cypress trees run through the district, giving the grounds a unified character, while Cemetery Road stands as a clue to how closely the burial grounds were tied to Del Rio’s development. It was the first road north of the railroad tracks in Del Rio to be graveled or paved, which places the cemeteries inside the city’s growth story rather than at its edges.

The district is also one of the very few Texas cemeteries listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It documents how Del Rio organized itself across religion, ethnicity, fraternal ties, public life and class from the late 19th century into the early 20th century.

What each cemetery reveals

Westlawn Cemetery, originally called the Public Cemetery, holds the grave of Del Rio’s first mayor. It also contains an African American section and an Independent Order of Odd Fellows section, which makes it one of the clearest places in town to see how civic status, race and fraternal affiliation shaped burial patterns.

Masonic Cemetery tells another part of the story. The Masonic lodge expanded it in 1905 by purchasing 10 adjacent acres, and the burials are organized in family plots with cement curbing. Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery shows yet another layer of Del Rio’s identity, with Hispanic gravestones decorated with ceramic tiles and religious imagery such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Saint Joseph Cemetery, reached through Sacred Heart, is known for modest handmade grave markers, many of them undated.

Sacred Heart as an anchor for Catholic Del Rio

Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery is inseparable from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, and the church’s timeline helps explain how long this Catholic landscape has been part of Del Rio. Mass was first celebrated in private homes and then in a wooden house at the site before construction of the native limestone church in 1891 to 1892. The mission became Sacred Heart parish in 1895, the church was enlarged and remodeled in 1929, and a new building was dedicated in 1969.

The cemetery’s gravestones, with their tiles and devotional imagery, stand beside a church whose history in Del Rio runs from Mass in private homes to a new building dedicated in 1969.

Why preservation and documentation matter now

The district holds the names of civic leaders, Catholic families, African American residents, fraternal members and everyday households whose burial choices still reveal Del Rio’s social divisions. When graves go undocumented, the loss is not abstract: descendants lose proof of family ties, local historians lose context, and the city loses part of the record that explains how it became what it is today.

That problem is not unique to Del Rio. The Texas Historical Commission warns that historic cemeteries face pressure from development, weathering, vegetation, vandalism and theft. In a place like Del Rio, where the burial grounds are still maintained and still visited, the challenge is not only physical upkeep but record-keeping that can survive the next generation.

A county-wide trail of memory

The Del Rio district sits within a broader Val Verde County burial landscape. Val Verde County was organized in 1885 from parts of Crockett, Kinney and Pecos counties, and the county’s cemetery history stretches well beyond the west side of Del Rio. In Langtry, Babb Cemetery was the first cemetery in the county to receive Historic Texas Cemetery status. It is a small, privately owned cemetery cut out of the brush on flat ground just southeast of the Langtry town site.

Langtry itself was created in 1882, when the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad signed a deed with the Torres family. That connection between railroad expansion and burial ground preservation mirrors what happened in Del Rio, where Cemetery Road and the four-cemetery district are part of the town’s built history.

Historic Texas Cemetery designation records a cemetery’s location and boundaries in county deed records, helps protect it by alerting current and future landowners, documents its condition with photographs and maps, and serves as a prerequisite for an Official Texas Historical Marker.

For family researchers, the county’s cemetery book adds another layer of access. It alphabetically lists names of the deceased and gravestone information for burials in six cemeteries, including Westlawn, Masonic, Sacred Heart, Del Rio Memorial Park, formerly Oaklawn, Carta Valley and Whitehead Memorial Museum. The result is a county record that reaches beyond any single district and keeps more of Val Verde’s buried history within reach.