At first, just the corner was visible in a field of old flood debris along an intermittent creek near The Plant at Kyle, on west FM 150. Martha Kinscherff and her husband Jamie, stewards and neighbors of the popular wedding venue, walked the area often, but it hadn’t caught their eye until one day just over a year ago.
“We lifted it up to see what it was and discovered it was a gravestone,” she recalled. What she still didn’t know was the story that would unfold about the person whose resting place it had marked. That story has since been filled, though many questions – including how it got to Central Texas – remain unanswered.
The Kinscherffs didn’t do anything with the stone until December 2019, when serendipity delivered the Hays County Historical Commission to a function at The Plant and seated Martha Kinscherff next to local historian Jo Landon.
“I mentioned we had the gravestone,” and Landon and another member of the commission asked to be sent a photo. “They took the ball from there,” she recalled.
Using the Find a Grave website, Landon discovered the stone had marked the gravesite of Margaret Clement, who was laid to rest in 1883 in the coastal town of Indianola in what is now Calhoun County – once a thriving port near the mouth of the Guadalupe River and gateway to elsewhere in Texas that was heavily damaged by a major hurricane in September 1875, then destroyed by another – along with a fire – in August 1886.
Landon said she and others contacted Robert Loflin of the Calhoun County Historical Commission and, as luck would have it, discovered he was planning a trip to Austin. Loflin pickup the gravestone on Jan. 4.
“After I got back I drove down there to make sure it fit,” Loflin said. The base of the headstone was still in place in the old Indianola Cemetery, he explained. The base “had part of the inscription – that’s partly how we were able to identify where it went.” Though weathered by time, he said the piece of the stone that Kinscherff had found fit the base “like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Loflin said he’s now “working with a conservation company to get the stone repaired.” Once that’s done, he plans to invite the Hays County Historical Commission down to see it restored to its rightful place.
No one is sure how the partial stone made its way from the coastal plains to a Hays County creekbed, but Landon has a theory that involves a connection between Margaret Clement, who died at the age of 37, and Eudora Inez Moore, who had also lived in Indianola but later moved in with her cousin Maggie Kuykendall. Decades ago, the area where The Plant at Kyle is located was part of the Kuykendall Ranch.
During the Civil War, Indianola was a critical staging area for Confederate troops, and Margaret Clement and Eudora Moore were part of a group of “12 young ladies” who sewed and presented a Confederate flag to the commander of an artillery company stationed at Fort Esperanza, which was across Matagorda Bay from Indianola.
The two women were reportedly friends. “Perhaps this connection may hold a clue as to how Margaret Clement’s stone found its way to the banks of the creek.”
Born in south Texas in Jan. 12, 1846, Margaret Clement’s father Robert F. Clement was an English Merchant and her mother was his first wife Christina Wallace, who had been born in Scotland. Christina died “when Margaret was still a little girl,” Landon said. “Her father then married her aunt, Margaret Wallace. For the duration of the Civil War, her father and stepmother/aunt returned to Bath in England, leaving Margaret with her married sister Sarah Burbank. By the time Margaret died at age 37, the family was united once again in South Texas.”
Margaret Clement died after the first major hurricane hit Indianola but three years before the second one. Kinscherff said it’s possible her friend Eudora brought the stone with her when her family abandoned Indianola for good.
“When they left they would take everything,” she said of families in that area at the time. “They would even take houses apart. I suspect they brought the gravestone with them.”
Loflin said another wrinkle tying the Texas coast with the Kyle area involves the Kuykendall family. “They actually moved from the Blessing/Palacios area up to Hays County,” after the family patriarch had worked cattle with legendary Abel Head “Shanghai” Pierce and decided to buy his own ranch. “We’re looking to see if there’s a connection between Clement and the Kuykendalls,” Loflin said. “We’re trying to figure out why the stone ended up all the way up here. It might be a longterm project to try to figure out.”
