Geocaching the Haunted Humble's Forgotten Geocache

Photo by Douglas Jackson  9/24/2010 - the area looks much worse right now due to the drought killing so many trees

Baytown Bert at the abandoned kerosen tanks next to cemetery

MuddyWaterGirl, Rambetta, and I visited this one in Humble the other day and it is a very interesting area.

GC3FN6F ▼ Humble's Forgotten N 30° 00.448 W 095° 15.641

This cache is just east of a very old cemetery named "HUMBLE NEGRO CEMETERY" and currently is being kept up by a local church. It is a very old history piece of Humble. Many graves here are unmarked or have been vandalized over the years. This area was undefinable for a long time till an incident occurred and brought *public attention to the cemetery. The only reason the cemetery is here is because a local businessman named Mr. Bender employed many black families and when Humble evicted them from their lives and even their graves, he let them live near here and bury their dead on his land. There are also remains on the north side of a old kerosene refinery, two concrete storage tanks and some concrete tank supports. Please use caution if you go exploring these areas. Its also said that this area is HAUNTED!

**HOUSTON (AP) *Three Kingwood teens have been arrested and accused of digging up a secluded grave and removing a skull in Humble, a city north of Houston. They dug up a grave, removed the skull from the coffin and converted it into a "bong," a device used to smoke marijuana, according to court documents.

MuddyWaterGirl, Rambetta, & Baytown Bert at the abandoned kerosene tank next to cememtery.

The photos show each of us at the abandoned giant cement kerosene refinery holding tanks. Supposedly Texaco operated these and lightning hit the open top tank, causing a horrendous fire. The fire killed many black laborers who were burned so badly, there was a mass unmarked grave in the area, but it may not have been the one next to it. The area has a history of paranormal activity, just one of the interesting places geocaching takes us. I started out on this journey to locate some hard to find caches and after not being able to find a very difficult cache, I texted MuddyWaterGirl (She grew up in Bay City) and she appeared shortly afterward.

She knew of this geocache, but had never been there and after a bit of plotting, we figured out a way to access it - just one part of this remote cache. It had many DNF's (Did not find) and after about fifteen minutes, I spotted it. We made our way back to her truck and Rambetta pulled up. She is from Baytown and an Army Bird Colonel and a friend of mine. After MWG left, Rambetta (Female Rambo) and I proceded to jump some ditches and straight-lined to the cache by the cemetery, since it was only about a quarter of a mile away from where we were currently parked - as the crow flies. We took photos and went our separate ways after returning to our vehicles.

Humble Negro Cemetery

The Humble Negro Cemetery is located in Harris County, Texas, just north of the City of Humble, Texas. It is located about 200 yards north of the FM 1960 by-pass which runs along the north side of Humble, Texas and east of the railroad tracks and U.S. Highway 59. (GPS Coordinates: Latitude: 30.006264, Longitude: -95.261829).

History

The City of Humble, Texas incorporated as a city in 1933. At that time, by vote of the City Council, racial segregation was invoked to make the town "lily white". The black population was forced to relocate their families as well as the graves of their dead to another location, outside the city limits. Starting in 1933, blacks began to move out of Humble. By 1935, almost everyone had moved.

There used to be a sawmill north of Humble that was owned by Mr. Bender, one of the founders of Humble. Blacks migrated from Gladysville, Cleveland, Splendora and Fastoria to work there. He was kind to the African-American people and gave them some property to live on and a place to bury their loved ones. The entire area is now referred to as Bordersville (informal), because the African-Americans were made to live outside the "border" of incorporated Humble.

Time took its toll on the cemetery over the years and the entire cemetery became overgrown. In 2005, the members of Grace Church, a multicultural church located in Humble, sought for permission from the owners of the land to clean and restore the land. This is something the descendants of the deceased had hoped and tried to do for a long time. After receiving clearance from the City of Humble and the Texas Department of Transportation, Grace Church spent many thousands of dollars putting in a road, clearing hundreds of trees, and working with local historians to restore the cemetery. In order to honor the veterans of war that are buried there, the church also installed a flag pole and U.S. flag station. Currently the church is pursuing a historical marker to be placed at the site. While hoping to turn the cemetery back to the loved ones of the deceased, the church continues to cover all maintenance and up keep at its own expense.

In 2008, however, there was an incident that involved disturbing one of the graves and descrating one of the bodies interred there. This incident brought the cemetery back into the public eye. The pastors of Grace Church oversaw the re-interment of the body.

The gravesites here are not arranged in rows or plots and only a few stones remain. They are randomly placed. Many of the graves are unmarked, or the stones have been removed. Very few, if any records were kept and several people have since desecrated the graveyard by reducing the graves themselves to a pile of rubble.
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Fun In The Sun Baytown Texas

My bride and I loaded up my awesome 2011 Cosmos Blue Jeep JKU Sport and our doggies for a day of adventure and headed east on I-10 for Anahuac, Texas - which spell check identified as Nahuatl, which I suspect was the original language over there.  I know it is in Channelview.  We stopped at the entrance to the Wallisville Lake Project to grab a geocache (GC36NMH), but it was in pieces.  I logged it as a find and alerted the cache owners, TxDwight and TxJoAnn56.

We briefly perused the fruit stand at I-10 and FM563, but decided we would buy from the other stand at High Island, later in the day.  We decided to make another stop at the Jackson Cemetery in Anahuac, as there is a geocache there also, called "Thriller" (GC33KBD). 

My bride is a descendant of the Barbers and the Barrows and we found a goodly number of gravestones of a branch of the Barrow family.

While I searched for the tiny geocache we let the dogs explore and my bride looked for kin folk's grave stones.  If you are interested in learning about geocaching, the Baytown area has over 300 "caches" hidden and the number is growing every day.  It's a wonderful family and kid-friendly activity and will take you to obscure parks, cemetery's and generally get a person off the couch.

A branch of the Barrow Family are buried at the Jackson Cemetery in Anahuac, Texas

When we returned home, I went on the Internet to ancestry.com and could not link these folks with my wife's side of the family.  She is a direct descendant of Daniel Barrow and Ruby Amanda Barber and not this line. I photographed the headstones and submitted the pictures on findagrave.com for those who research this kind of stuff.  Its actually very popular and my brother TJ Bustem and sister Connie Byrd are heavily involved.

I call my Jeep Wrangler "tha Choppa" as it takes me anywhere I want to go, like a helicopter. "Get to the Choppa!"

We headed for a hike and a drive through the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge to see if we could see some gators, but it was already very hot and we were unsuccessful. If you want to see wildlife, I advise going 60 miles south to Brazos Bend State Park instead.

At the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, we walked the boardwalk.

The last time I was down on this beach and what is left of SH-87, was about 10 years ago with the Baytown Chapter of the TX4X4 Cyber Club, now defunct, with the Boyd brothers, Bruce and Marshal.  Bruce was the President of our chapter and was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident on SH-146 in late 2003.  I haven't seen Marshal in a long time, although I talked to Bruce's wife the other day.  We led a group of over 120 Jeeps and 4-wheel drive trucks to Sabine Pass over the destroyed road.  The man at the fruit stand remembered the event.  I turned leadership of the whole club, which I founded, over to someone else and it is now called TX4WD.

The 25 mile stretch of road-beach between High Island and Sabine Pass.

The tide was in, along with a heavy stinky kelp deposit, which ran for miles.  The coastline is replete with trash and plastic and looks terrible, but this stretch of the coastline has never been pretty to me and others.  Hurricane Ike rearranged it considerably and the state has cut an alternate path inland, which due to the debris and oil-laden sand on the coast, forced us up onto it.  It's still very much a 4-wheel drive trail though, so beware if you think you can do it in your Zephyr.  We had a Chevy truck follow us for about 4 slow miles before they finally decided it was too risky and turned back.  Charles Goss and I rescued a man and his truck here one time who had been stuck for 18 hours.

Just for fun I drove up on a fallen log.

If I was going to "wheel" this beach, I would have aired my tires down and disconnected my sway-bars, but we were the Lone Ranger out here and it is never a good idea to wheel alone.  There are still plenty of obstacles, logs, giant chunks of asphalt, boggy quicksand, and debris to "crawl" over though - just don't do it alone.  My next beach run will be down south to Matagorda and 30 miles of pretty danged good beach.  The best though are North and South Padre Island.  I call this stretch of beach we are on, HISP.  High Island to Sabine Pass and it is pretty much boring and ugly, but in Texas, where most everything is private property, a person has to go to what is available if they want to test their machines against the terrain.