Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainBrownsville's first official cemetery, active 1848–1870s and built over; 700+ graves rediscovered in 2004, and the area was long called 'Pasto de las Animas' — Field of the Spirits.
Near E 12th St and E Madison St, Brownsville, TX 78520
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Outdoor public area; no admission fee. The historical marker at the Cameron County courthouse is the primary publicly accessible landmark for this site.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Urban downtown area; historical marker and courthouse grounds accessible from sidewalk
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1848 · Brownsville's original municipal cemetery, 1848 · Rediscovery of 700+ graves in 2004 · Academic archaeological documentation · Historical marker at Cameron County courthouse · Pasto de las Animas — Field of the Spirits local designation
When Brownsville was laid out in 1848 following the Mexican-American War, its founders established a municipal cemetery in the downtown townsite. This original burial ground, the Campo Santo Viejo, served the early Anglo, Mexican, and mixed-heritage community through two decades of frontier life, epidemic disease, and the periodic violence of the border region.
By the 1870s the cemetery had been closed and its location became obscured as Brownsville's downtown expanded. Buildings and infrastructure were eventually constructed over the buried ground. The site's location became a matter of local memory rather than active preservation for more than a century.
In 2004, construction work associated with a parking lot project at the Cameron County courthouse broke into the buried cemetery, revealing intact graves. Subsequent archaeological investigation, documented in a WorldCat-catalogued academic report, recovered evidence of more than 700 interments. The discovery prompted a historical marker documenting the cemetery's founding in 1848, its active period, its abandonment around 1864, and the 2004 rediscovery. The archaeological report is preserved in academic library collections.
The Historical Marker Database records that the surrounding area had a vernacular name by the 1880s: 'Pasto de las Animas,' or Field of the Spirits, derived from reports of mysterious lights that local residents attributed to souls of those buried outside the bounds of consecrated ground — a common folkloric explanation in Catholic border communities for unexplained nocturnal phenomena near unmarked graves.
Sources
Within a decade or two of the Campo Santo Viejo's closure and physical erasure from the downtown landscape, Brownsville residents had already assigned the area a name that captured what people claimed to see there: 'Pasto de las Animas,' the Field of the Spirits. KVEO-TV coverage of the cemetery's history documents that reports of mysterious lights drifting over the ground in the 1880s prompted this designation — lights that community members interpreted as the spirits of those buried in the abandoned and forgotten ground.
The interpretation fits a pattern common in Catholic communities along the Texas-Mexico border, where an unmarked or desecrated burial site was understood to produce restless spirits unable to complete their passage. The Campo Santo Viejo's situation was particularly resonant: these were early settlers and townspeople whose graves had not simply been lost but actively built over, with the ground treated as ordinary real estate rather than a burial ground requiring respect or maintenance.
The 2004 discovery of 700+ graves beneath the courthouse parking lot converted what had been an oral tradition and local nickname into a documented archaeological reality. The historical marker placed at the site gives the story an official anchor point for visitors who make the connection between the 1880s light-reports and the proven presence of hundreds of the buried dead beneath the streets.
Media Appearances
Visit the historical marker documenting the Campo Santo Viejo site at the Cameron County courthouse grounds. The marker explains the 1848 cemetery's history, its closure, the construction that covered it, and the 2004 archaeological rediscovery of over 700 graves. The broader area encompassing E 12th and Madison was historically called 'Pasto de las Animas' (Field of the Spirits).
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