Family burying ground used in 1849 for early settler Ritson Morris/Morriss and then a few more members of his family.

The land now lies under water, washed away.

DETAILS. Rather than travel in Texas heat to more distant church or town cemeteries, many locals were said to instead bury loved ones "in their flower gardens". Old maps show the Morris "league" of land as located on the Houston side of Clear Lake and its outlet flowing to Galveston Bay. The land was downstream of land bordered by Taylor Bayou (now Taylor Lake). The lake's outlet, Clear Creek, has today largely disappeared. The area is still scenic, so the view would have been resort-like back then. The columned house of the Morriss family was built on a bluff overlooking the creek mouth, directly facing the big bay.

A descendant of Mr. Morriss named Rosa Tod Hamner, when interviewed in the 1970s for an oral history project said the family lost considerable acreage on the ocean-facing side of Toddville Road over the decades, due to erosion and storms. The land had already begun to wash away in the mid-to-late 1800s, with a hurricane storm in 1900 then destroying many old buildings in the area.

Not able to erect a memorial for Ritson where he had been buried, the state's history buffs settled for erecting a metal monument outside the local library serving Seabrook. Seabrook's official town cemetery is of more recent date, but near the library, closer to the ocean waters. It formed around the family burying ground of Virginia, Ritson's eldest daughter, who had married an Alfred Menard. (Virginia's widowed mother reportedly given 100 acres of league land to her children when they married, with several seen living close-by in the 1850 US Census. Alfred Menard was related to the Menard who founded Galveston and to the Menard who was a governor of early Illinois, ruling from Kaskasia, a place that also mostly washed away. Earlier, the French-Canadian Menards had traded furs along the Mississippi River. The waterside trading system in use then ran along the Great Lakes, through present-day Minnesota, down to St. Louis, and finally to New Orleans, the last not far from Houston and Galveston, as they settled.)