Jefferson Davis Hospital

The building at 1101 Elder Street was a hospital for thirteen years. Houston and Harris County opened it in 1925 on five acres that had served as the city cemetery since 1840, and in 1937 a larger Jefferson Davis Hospital on Allen Parkway took over the work. That second building closed in 1989 and came down in 1999, and its dates are routinely pasted onto this one. The graves stayed where they were. Because no widespread removal took place, the basement was built above ground level, and the archaeological survey carried out for the 2004-05 conversion into the Elder Street Artist Lofts found sixty-four previously unknown graves without a single exhumation. The hospital was segregated by design: the original drawings put the wards for African American patients in that raised basement, along a double corridor, and the renovation architects marked the line of the vanished partition with a stripe in the floor. The dead under the building are documented Houstonians, among them paupers, epidemic victims, freed slaves and Confederate veterans.

Houston bought five acres north of Buffalo Bayou from a trust set up by the Allen brothers for $750, and the deed for the Houston City Cemetery was received on 25 May 1840. The National Register nomination calls the ground "the only active city cemetery from c.1840 to c.1870". Working from city records for the Houston Press in 2000, Brian Wallstin listed its four divisions: a potter's field for "criminals, persons of infamous character, such as [those who] commit suicide, and [those] killed ... from a wound received in a duel"; the commons, for people "not otherwise provided for"; a section for blacks, who at the time were usually slaves; and plots sold to families. Cholera in 1866 and yellow fever in 1867 added to it, and after the Civil War, in the nomination's words, returned Confederate soldiers, freed slaves and occupying Federal troops "were often buried together in the city cemetery without regard to class, social status, or race". By 1879 the ground was closed to new interments. City Sexton R. F. Pannell reported in 1880 that the city's burial grounds were "so filled that there is not room in any of them for the burial of paupers without disturbing some graves". In 1904 the city moved to rescind the land's designation as a burial ground so it could be sold for industrial development, and the City Council approved a resolution to subdivide the property and lay out streets. Mayor A. L. Jackson vetoed the idea under pressure from the Daughters of the Confederacy and the First Ward Division of the Houston Civic Club. The question came back in the 1920s, and on 5 February 1923, during Oscar Holcombe's first term as mayor, the city passed Ordinance No. 749 creating a board of managers for a city and county public hospital for charity patients, and the nomination records what happened next in one line: "Despite citizen protests, plans were approved to construct the hospital on the southeastern corner of the five-acre cemetery." A local chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy, which had been caring for part of the burial ground, went to court. Mark Denton, an archeologist with the Texas Historical Commission, told Wallstin that city officials read the judge's ruling to mean the hospital could go up as long as it avoided the portion where Confederate soldiers were thought to lie. "So they went ahead and developed the property without regard to anyone else's bodies or graves," Denton said. The council agreed to name the building for the president of the Confederacy, and at the dedication a bronze plaque was unveiled that read "In loving memory of our Confederate soldiers, whose sacred dust lies buried in the shadow of this building." Bruce C. Webb, writing in Cite in 2006, gives the same words as an inscription on the cornerstone. City architect W. A. Dowdy designed a three-storey Classical Revival building on a raised basement, and the Russell Brown Company of Houston built it under a contract the Texas General Contractors Association bulletin put at $182,000, inside total costs of around $400,000. Dowdy's plans were drawn for 150 patients; the nomination and the city's landmark report both describe a capacity of 240 beds. The three dates in circulation for the opening all come from documents: the city report dates the dedication to 2 December 1924, the nomination says "Jefferson Davis Hospital opened on March 15, 1925", and the Handbook of Texas gives 6 April 1925. Representatives of the Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy attended. The reason the basement sits above ground is on the state marker cast in 2008 and still standing at the door: "As there was no widespread removal of graves from the site, the building's basement was erected above ground." The nomination is plain about who used that basement. "The hospital was segregated and it is know from the original drawings that the raised basement level offered services to African American patients. Also on this level is a double or segregated corridor." Webb read the same drawings and recorded what the restoration did with them: "on the ground floor a partition divided the corridor into separate wards and clinics for blacks and whites, an historical fact that the present-day architects noted by replacing the partition with a stripe on the floor." The plans also label two rooms on the second floor as the men's and women's insane wards. The building served as a hospital for thirteen years. The city's landmark report puts the population growth at 111.4 percent between 1920 and 1930, to 292,352, and a larger Jefferson Davis Hospital by Alfred C. Finn and Joseph Finger went up on Buffalo Drive, now Allen Parkway. Wallstin dates the handover: "On January 1, 1938, its mission was transferred to a new hospital, also called Jefferson Davis, on Allen Parkway." Elder Street then held, in the marker's list, "a psychiatric hospital, juvenile detention ward, food stamp distribution center and records storage facility", and Wallstin adds a convalescent home, a venereal disease clinic and a drug treatment centre. The second Jefferson Davis Hospital closed in 1989 and came down in 1999; the Federal Reserve built on its site. Elder Street emptied out in the late 1980s, and the damage to the cemetery had been done well before that. In 1986 a water-line trench for a $10 million expansion of a fire department maintenance yard next door cut through at least thirty graves. Armed guards were posted after it emerged that workers had taken bones and teeth for souvenirs, and Kenneth Brown of the University of Houston's anthropology department was called in, identified some of the remains as Confederate soldiers and accused the workers of taking "ghoulie souvenirs". Avenue Community Development Corporation and Artspace Projects Inc. of Minneapolis bought the property from Harris County, and Prewitt and Associates of Austin trenched fifteen areas of the grounds before construction. Webb gives the count: "All in all the archeological investigation resulted in the discovery of 64 previously unknown graves beneath and around the building". He adds that the archaeology consultants reported that careful planning let the rehabilitation proceed without any grave having to be exhumed and moved. The lofts opened in October 2005 with thirty-four live/work units, and took in artists and musicians displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

The address is 1101 Elder Street, Houston, Texas 77007. The building is the Elder Street Artist Lofts, thirty-four live/work apartments rented by Avenue, the nonprofit formerly called Avenue Community Development Corporation, on 713-985-4030. It is private housing without a museum, a ticket office or interior access for the public. The first-floor corridor is a gallery for the residents' work, and the rest of the building is their home. The outside can be seen from Elder Street, and the National Register nomination describes the front as it still stands: "A grand staircase rises above the basement level to a large entry portico." The hospital's name is carved in the frieze above it. The Texas Historical Commission marker stands at the entrance; the Atlas record for marker number 15523 gives its condition as "In Situ", its location as "Elder Street Artist Lofts" and its private-property status as "No", so the text can be read from the public side. The file is free and complete, and not where most people look for it. NPGallery serves National Register reference 05000859 as a 22,151-byte PDF whose only sentence reads "The PDF file for this National Register record has not yet been digitized." The Texas Historical Commission's Atlas serves the same reference as the full thirty-page nomination, with the drawings and photographs, at atlas.thc.texas.gov/NR/pdfs/05000859/05000859.pdf. The 2013 protected landmark report is on the city's own site, and Bruce C. Webb's account of the archaeology is in Cite 68. The ground itself is regulated. The Texas Historical Commission designated the cemetery a State Archeological Landmark in 1995, and the nomination sets out what that means for anyone who digs there. The owners and the City of Houston "work closely with the Texas Historical Commission to ensure that graves discovered in the course of work on the site (either demolition or new construction) are recorded and the remains are re-interred according to local and state regulations." Two of the surviving pieces have separate fates. The 1929 power plant behind the hospital was to become a community space for the residents. The nurses' quarters at 1225 Elder Street lost a large section of its roof to wind and rain in January 2017, and the U.S. Department of the Interior wrote on 13 April that the "building suffered a substantial collapse recently"; County Engineer John Blount recommended demolition, telling the Houston Chronicle "We were having people break in, and I'm afraid if they break in, it might fall down on them." Commissioners set a public hearing for 22 May 2017. The old residents' domain elderstreetartists.com now resolves to a Bluehost placeholder page. Leasing runs through elderstreetartistlofts.com and Avenue's office. All web addresses here were consulted on 7 September 2026.