8 things you don’t know about the convict cemetery uncovered in Sugar Land

Our investigative podcast series "Sugar Land" is out now wherever you get your podcasts. It's about the 95 unmarked graves uncovered during construction of a new Fort Bend ISD school in 2018. Most of us in Houston heard that story when it broke. But here are 8 things you probably DON'T know:

1. Their bodies didn't have to be exhumed and studied

• Fort Bend ISD, the Texas Historical Commission and the archeologists on site knew the history of this land before construction began. When they started finding graves, they should have been able to deduce they belonged to convicts from the lease era. At that point, they could have conducted archival, genealogical and historical research to determine who would make up a representative community and gather them together to make decisions on behalf of the dead. Many other unearthed cemeteries are left as they are. The bodies are not exhumed, studied, photographed or tested–they are simply preserved in place. A representative descendant community might have wanted to see the bodies studied and DNA tested, but they were never asked.

2. There likely wasn't a woman among the 95

• Two years after the cemetery was discovered, the school district published a report detailing all the research that had been done on the site. According to bio-archeologist Catrina Banks Whitley, the cemetery contained 94 men and 1 woman. What the report failed to address is that there wouldn't have been a female convict at this camp. Women were made to do a lot of the same work as men during the convict lease era, but they were worked on separate farms. The Sugar Land area camps were not co-ed. When I spoke to Whitley about this, she said, "That individual was very fragmented. We didn't have a whole lot of that individual. So, we were having to rely on circumference of some of the long bones to try to tell us if we're looking at a male or female. And the problem with that, too, is we don't know if this was a younger child, right? So it's something that when we kind of look at, say, percentages of accuracy, it was lower on the percentage of accuracy.” So, that person very well could have been a male. And even if that person was a woman, that woman was likely not a convict, based on the historical evidence available.

3. The cemetery containing the Sugar Land 95 is not the Bullhead Camp Cemetery

• If you were to visit the cemetery containing the Sugar Land 95 today, first you'd have to go outside of school hours because it is on the property of an open and active school, and second, you'd assume that it's called the Bullhead Camp Cemetery because that's what is on the signs surrounding it.
• In 1909, a group of Texas lawmakers investigating the prison system traveled to convict labor camps throughout the state and spoke with prisoners, guards, administrators, etc. Among them was a former sergeant named R.J. Ritchie, who said, "Generally have on each camp what is known as 'convict graveyard.' The Bullhead camp had a graveyard about three hundred yards from the camp in the corner of a pasture." Based on that testimony, archeologist Reign Clark and his team assumed that the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery and the Bullhead Camp Cemetery must be one and the same. But they aren't.
• We took every mention of the Bullhead Camp and the guards and convicts associated with it and cross referenced their names and descriptions with prison employment records, convict registers and newspaper clippings. There is no question that every single one of them refers to a camp on E.H. Cunningham's plantation.
• The Sugar Land 95 were found on what was then known as the Ellis plantation. We know this because we reviewed over 200 handwritten deeds from the Fort Bend County Clerk’s collection of property records and the Texas General Land Office’s Land Grant Database, and mapped out the whole Sugar Land area from the 1800s to now.
• tl;dr Sugar Land 95 cemetery was on Ellis plantation, Bullhead camp was on Cunningham plantation. Visit sugarlandpodcast.com/soiled to see maps and more

4. The Texas Historical Commission plans to erect a Texas Historical Marker featuring the inaccurate cemetery name

• The state agency in charge of safeguarding historic sites doesn't seem to care that the cemetery is misnamed. A spokesman for the agency told us Bullhead "is the only documented name that could be found during the historical research on this Convict Labor Camp.” And when we asked how they evaluated PRG’s full report for historical accuracy, he said that all reports were reviewed by experienced Historical Commission staff. This mistake was reviewed by THC a few different times. First, when the report was first submitted, then again when Reign Clark and his team applied for a new antiquities permit to continue research and again when FBISD applied for the historical marker. THC signed off at every point, and Fort Bend ISD will get their free historical marker soon enough.

5. The Bullhead Camp Cemetery is real and still hasn't been found

• The actual Bullhead Camp Cemetery, the one Sgt. Ritchie mentioned in his 1909 testimony, likely exists somewhere on Cunningham's former plantation. His plantation spanned over 12,000 acres and makes up the majority of the City of Sugar Land today. From the records available, we found that, at one point (~1890s), the camp went by E.H. Cunningham #4 and then later (~1900s) it was called E.H. Cunningham #5. We assume it is located somewhere along the historic Bullhead Bayou because of the name. It contains convict graves from the same time period as the Sugar Land 95 cemetery. And because the Sugar Land 95 cemetery is misnamed, the existence of this other cemetery is erased.
• We've started compiling a list of people who could be buried in the Real Bullhead Camp Cemetery. See Ep. 8 "More Bodies" to hear about one of these men.

6. Cunningham and Ellis did not co-own and operate their convict lease plantations in Sugar Land

• People often make this assumption because Ellis and Cunningham were once business partners, but that partnership did not extend to their Sugar Land operations. From 1878 to 1883, Cunningham and Ellis leased the entire penitentiary in Huntsville. They made repairs, sent convicts out to work at different camps and were in charge of feeding, clothing, housing, healing and punishing them. Ellis purchased his first property in Sugar Land in July 1880 and began leasing convicts there in August. A few years later, Cunningham purchased a giant former slave plantation right next door to Ellis, but he didn’t start leasing convicts there until September 1882–three months before their lease of the penitentiary was set to expire. Each man bought up a ton of land in the Sugar Land area until their two plantations covered nearly all of the modern city. They did not purchase the land as a team or lease convicts to work the land as a team.

7. Despite years of supposed genealogical research, few direct descendants or kin have been notified that their loved ones could be buried in the SL95 Cemetery

• In 2018, Helen Graham (the Dean of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Education at Houston Community College) contacted Fort Bend ISD to say she was interested in helping them do genealogical research to identify descendants of the SL95. But, several years in, she told us, "I don't want to contact anyone at all until that [DNA] analysis is actually done.” She has instead relied on people coming forward and saying "I think I might be a descendant," which, if you listen to the podcast…is really hard to figure out if you don't know what you're looking for.
• Over the past two years, we've built public family trees for over 130 men who could be buried in the Sugar Land 95 cemetery and have tracked down living descendants of a good number of them. We're working with experts now to help establish an organized descendant community who can make decisions on behalf of their ancestors going forward.

8. Fort Bend ISD paid MASS Design to design a memorial space at the cemetery site, but who's gonna pay to build it?

• As recently as 2 weeks ago, Fort Bend ISD was spreading the message that they've been working with "the community" to design a memorial space that will properly honor the Sugar Land 95. In 2021, the Fort Bend ISD Board of Trustees approved a $170,000 contract with MASS Design to design said memorial space. But we asked the school district's lawyer in March 2023 if the district intended to pay to execute the design and he said, "I would not say that I would see that happening. Not to say that I wouldn't support it, I just think that's a stretch."

It's also worth asking…who makes up "the community" so often cited by Fort Bend ISD and others interested in the cemetery?

• Michael Blakey, the physical anthropologist who led research on the New York African Burial Ground told us not all communities should be given equal consideration. "There are those who would say, ‘we're doing civic engagement. We're involving the voices of the descendant community.’ But it will essentially be in token ways," Blakey said. "Either after the fact they will get some opinions, or as I mentioned earlier, they will get opinions from those they want to have opinions from and delegitimize the others as somehow outrageous. They will debate the question of community. ‘There are many communities,’ they'll say. In New York, they first argued the archaeologists represented a community. And that's why we developed–why I–developed an idea of a descendant community. And continue to say, all communities are not equal in all things.” This feels especially important here. We know the Sugar Land 95 were mostly Black and came from all across Texas. Only five men on our list of people who could be buried there were convicted in Fort Bend County. The rest didn’t live in Sugar Land, their families likely didn’t live in Sugar Land, but a small group of people in Sugar Land were and are allowed to make decisions about them.

“Only the family determines when, where and how a burial will take place," Blakey said. "But you're happy to see the church congregation and the neighbors come to the funeral and certainly not object to it and say, ‘well, we must determine what the funeral is.’ But that's the kind of power grabbing and assumptions of entitlement that we see at these sites.”

TL;DR Listen to Sugar Land wherever you get your podcasts and visit sugarlandpodcast.com