Resting in peace isn't so easy around here

Back in March, we talked about how the city was getting ready to re-bury some bones unearthed 20 years ago during construction at the HFD complex off Houston Avenue and Dart Street. The fire department office/training facility was built in the 1960s on top of the old City Cemetery, where Houstonians of all stripes (including quite a few Confederate soldiers) were buried between about 1840 and 1870. UH anthropologist Ken Brown, who had criticized the city for continuing to dig after the bones were found, took the remains to his lab to study them. What happened for the next 20 years isn't clear: The city claims Brown hung onto the bones, but Brown says he asked the city to re-bury them and nothing ever happened. Whatever the case, the bones were forgotten until City Councilwoman Ada Edwards heard about them and led a push to have them buried again.

So that brought us up to March, when a site had been located near where the bones were originally buried and Edwards was patting herself on the back for having handled things in such a dignified, respectful manner (we suppose after you've had a fire department training facility built on your grave, "dignified" and "respectful" become a little more relative). And yet the bones apparently didn't get buried until yesterday, when they were re-laid to rest in a small grassy plot on the HFD property. Four months and some-odd days really isn't that much of a delay when you think about it: These people have been dead for well over 100 years and were sitting on a shelf in a UH storage room for the last 20 of those. Four months is nothing.

City parks employees have beautified the re-burial spot by removing an old fence and laying fresh grass. Capt. Karen DuPont, HFD's City Council liaison, said she hopes a local historical group will donate a plaque for the site; it would join an older marker nearby that recognizes the 32 Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery. "That marker there right now reflects one particular interest group," DuPont told the Chronicle. "I want it to reflect the use of the cemetery as a whole."

Meanwhile, Edwards said the re-burial should serve as an example of how to handle similar situations in the future: "We're gonna run into some bones down the line, and it's good seeing now that we have a policy in what we do and how we do it," she said. Policy, eh? Let's see: desecrate old graves, unceremoniously keep the remains on a shelf for a few years, then re-bury them in a tiny plot in the middle of a fire department facility. Check!

(In case you'e wondering, there is — or was, last time we checked — a visible reminder of the old cemetery. It's a low stone curbing in front of the Elder Street Artist Lofts at the corner of Elder Street and Ware Avenue, just around the corner from the HFD complex. The building, formerly the Jeff Davis Hospital, was built in the early 1920s on top of another section of the City Cemetery, and the story goes that a member of the Super family — the curbing marks the outline of their family plot — held construction crews at bay with a shotgun, ensuring the plot wouldn't disappear.)