Historical grave marker found and returned

Call it what you will — serendipity or a lost soul yearning for home.

In December, the Hays County Historical Commission met on the former 101 Ranch near Hays City at “The Plant at Kyle” wedding venue, which is owned by Mark Holzbach and Dana Friis-Hansen and managed by neighbors, Jamie and Martha Kinscherff.  

Kinscherff told the commission’s cemetery chair, Jo Landon, of her discovery of a broken gravestone in debris washed down in nearby York Creek, known locally as Potter’s Creek. The stone read “Sacred to the memory of Margaret Clement,” and gave a birth date in 1846.

Landon, using an invaluable modern tool —Find A Grave, identified who it belonged to and whence it came. The gravestone commemorates Margaret Clement who died on January 31, 1883, and was buried in Indianola Cemetery in Calhoun County, Texas. Calhoun County is located on the Gulf of Mexico, just north of Port Aransas.

Landon contacted the chairman of the Calhoun County Historical Commission, Robert Loflin, who happened to be in Austin on Jan. 4, and arranged for Loflin to pick up the stone.

Loflin was delighted, especially as his county historical commission is attempting to restore the Indianola Cemetery which was abandoned after the devastating hurricane of 1886. The cemetery is near the water’s edge at Matagorda Bay and Powderhorn Lake.

The newly recovered stone will be reconnected to its base which still stands.  It was removed from the cemetery between inventories taken in 1958 and 2005.

About Margaret Clement

Margaret Clement was born in Indianola on Jan. 12, 1846, the daughter of English merchant, Robert F. Clement, and his Scottish-born first wife, Christina Wallace. Margaret’s mother died while she was still a little girl.  

Her father then married her aunt, Margaret Wallace.  For the duration of the Civil War, her father and aunt/stepmother returned to Bath in England, leaving Margaret with her married sister, Sarah Burbank. But by the time Margaret died at age 37 in 1883, the family was once again united in South Texas.

During the Civil War, Margaret was one of 12 young ladies who sailed to Matagorda Island to present a Confederate flag to Captain J. M. Reuss’ artillery company at Fort Esperanza.  Interestingly, one of the group was Eudora Inez Moore who later moved north to live with her niece, Maggie Kuykendall, on the 101 Ranch. 

It is not known how the stone made it to Central Texas from the gulf area. It appears likely that a Kuykendall family relative visiting family cemeteries in the Indianola area may have come across the broken stone and decided to rescue it. Later somehow forgotten, it was washed down the creek during a flood until found by Martha Kinscherff in 2019.