In the early morning hours of Sunday, September 14, 199, a hurricane made landfall in Corpus Christi after gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks. Crowds packed the North Beach area for their last weekend of the summer season, most continuing to ignore the last-minute evacuation warnings of police officers, firefighters and soldiers from Fort Brown.
The rapidly rising water blocked vacationers from escaping to higher ground. As the water rose, people climbed to their rooftops and tied ropes to themselves and their children so that they might not be lost. A giant wave of water carrying oil from ruptured tanks on Harbor Island, timber from Port Aransas and cotton bales from a dock in Corpus Christi crashed down on North Beach, sweeping its victims into the black waters of Nueces Bay.
On Monday morning the sun rose on a scene of terrible destruction. Though the official death toll was 284, estimates place the actual number, including those lost at sea, at one thousand. In the ensuing days, the survivors worked together to rebuild their homes, rescue the injured and bury the dead in mass graves, some containing more than fifty bodies, using farm implements as undertaking tools. A month later the bodies were removed to Rose Hill Cemetery in Corpus Christi and other sites as requested by friends and family members.
Property damage and crop losses were estimated at twenty million dollars. The great storm of 1919 was the worst disaster to hit Corpus Christi in the twentieth Century. The mass graves at Indian Point were about one hundred yards east of this site.
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