A 51-year wait ends as Kerrville gives its historic cemetery a permanent caretaker

On a Sunday afternoon in 1976, Rosa Lavender and her husband were out for a drive when they came across a cemetery almost no one remembered. The fence was down. Trees and brush had swallowed the graves. In places the ground had washed out so badly that, as Lavender would tell the City Council a half-century later, you could take a hoe handle and tap on the caskets.

It took her 51 years to make sure that would never happen again.

On Tuesday, June 23, the Kerrville City Council approved a services agreement and Resolution No. 28-2026, conveying the historic 2.8-acre Tivy Mountain Historic Black Cemetery at 1280 Cypress Creek Road to a newly formed nonprofit, the Tivy Mountain Historic Black Cemetery Association. The vote ended a search for a permanent caretaker that began the same school year Lavender’s students first cleared the brush.

The cemetery is easy to drive past. It sits at the northeast corner where Tivy Street, Veterans Highway and Cypress Creek Road meet, behind an ornate, locked gate and a new sign that reads “Tivy Mountain Cemetery, Established in 1903.” As City Manager Dalton Rice reminded the council, it is not the better-known Tivy Mountain — the hill where graduating seniors make their climb and where Capt. Joseph Tivy and his family are buried. (That hilltop plot, Mayor Joe Herring Jr. noted in his column this week, also holds a cat named Herman, in a grave dug, as the story goes, by a young Chester A. Nimitz.) Rice told council members the cemetery property was deeded in 1949.

What the gate guards is one of the most significant pieces of Black history in Kerr County. More than 200 people are buried there, most of them local, some of them patients who died at the state tuberculosis hospital. Because of its age, and because it served Black families, it holds the largest number of graves of formerly enslaved people anywhere in the county. In a column published this week in The Lead, Herring — the community’s unofficial historian — counted 16 people buried there who were born before the end of the Civil War, meaning most were probably born into slavery.

Their lives trace the county’s earliest chapters. Charles James “Jim” Thornton, born in 1835 and the earliest-born person resting there, enlisted in 1864 in Kentucky’s 12th Regiment, Heavy Artillery, U.S. Colored Troops, winning his freedom through Union service before making his way to Kerr County, where he married and farmed his own land. Isaiah Blanks, born into slavery in Louisiana in 1843, arrived as a man held by Dr. Charles Ganahl — who owned nearly half the enslaved people in Kerr County in 1860 — and, after emancipation, worked 38 years in the home of Capt. Charles Schreiner. His wife, Lydia Edmonds Blanks, born into slavery in Florida, cooked for the Schreiner family. The couple raised twelve children and, by Isaiah’s death in 1930, counted 46 grandchildren. Herring wrote that the Blanks family once lived in a Schreiner house near where the downtown clock tower stands today.

For all that history, the cemetery spent decades with no one formally responsible for it. Local news stories in the early 2000s found that the City of Kerrville actually owned the land — a fact that, over time, the city itself had forgotten. Tuesday’s action settles the question. Under the agreement, the association takes over ownership and maintenance, but the deed carries reversionary “clawback” provisions: if the nonprofit dissolves, loses its tax-exempt status or stops maintaining the cemetery for its public purpose, the land reverts to the city.

Ahead of the handoff, Parks and Recreation Director Jay Brimhall and his crews did much of the heavy work the site had needed for years — clearing overgrown brush, installing a flag pole, replacing the property sign and repairing the gate. Council members singled out Brimhall’s department for praise.

Clifton “Coach” Fifer, who spoke for the new association’s committee, has roots that run straight into the ground he was thanking the city for clearing. A longtime community fixture, Fifer has numerous relatives buried at the cemetery; his is one of the family names that recur among the graves, alongside the Colemans, Blanks and Neals. “I want to thank the city manager for his support in this project and Jay for helping us with cleanup,” Fifer said. “Things that we’ve asked the city to do, they got it opened. And as a committee, we just want to say thank you.”

Council member Jeff Harris returned the thanks, crediting Fifer’s knowledge of the grounds and the cleanup help of others, including Mike Oates. Fifer, Harris said, had been praised for his help “identifying grave sites — and probably a whole lot more that we don’t know about that are out there.”

But the day belonged to Lavender, who first took on the cemetery as a project with her Tivy High School civics class during the 1975–76 school year, around the nation’s bicentennial. Her students marked graves, cut waist-high grass, researched the burials and kept a scrapbook. Then the trail went cold. “We worked on that the whole school year and then we found that no one was willing to take over responsibility to keep it clean and keep it taken care of,” she told the council.

The final push came last year, when a member of Annie Doyle’s family visited Kerrville. Herring — who happens to be one of Lavender’s former students — drove the visitor out to see the Doyle Community Center and the cemetery. “She said, ‘Who does this belong to?'” Lavender recalled, “and he told her, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.'” He did.

Some members of the association that will now care for the cemetery are descendants of the people buried in it. For Lavender, the wait is finally over.

“I’ve waited 51 years to see this happen,” she told the council, “and so this is pretty exciting for us to see this finally come to fruition.”