The Downtown Crypt
by Louis F. Aulbach
Click on image to enlarge.
You would not ordinarily think of the banks of Buffalo Bayou in downtown Houston as an ideal burial spot, but in the 19th century, the south bank near Franklin Avenue entombed the remains of several members of a prominent Houston family.
Timothy Donnellan was a violinist who had immigrated to Texas from Ireland. By 1840, Tim Donnellan had obtained a patented title to 100 acres of land in Harris County, and he owned ten town lots in Houston.
Harris County records show that Timothy Donnellan and Emily de Adendy (recorded as "Emilie De Ende") formalized their marriage on May 11, 1841. Emily was the daughter of the French General de Adendy of New Orleans.
When Tim Donnellan died in 1849, he was buried in a large, red brick vault built in the south bank of Buffalo Bayou at the west end of Franklin Avenue. Like her husband, Emily Donnellan was buried in the vault when she died in 1867. Two sons of Tim Donnellan also were interred in the vault after their deaths from an accidental explosion in 1866.
In 1863, the Confederate ship Augusta sank at the foot of Travis Street and was inexplicably abandoned by the Confederate forces. For years afterward, when the bayou was low, the ship would reappear from below the depths and people would recover relics from the sunken ship. In 1866, the two Donnellan boys were exporing the ruins of the sunken vessel in the shallows of Buffalo Bayou when they found a bomb. They were working on the detonator cap to defuse it when the bomb exploded and killed both boys. The remains that could be found were collected and placed in the family vault.
The sunken Confederate ship blew up in 1910 due to unknown causes and sank away into the oblivion of the bayou silt.
One surviving member of the Donnellan family was Thuse Donnellan, a famous Houston artist. Thurston John "Thuse" Donnellan was born in Houston in 1840 to Timothy and Emily Donnellan. He began painting at age eighteen, and Thuse studied art in Chicago and New Orleans. Thuse Donnellan was best known for his portraits of Sam Houston. Three of these portraits of Sam Houston are in Houston, at City Hall, in the Houston Public Library and at Rice University. Donnellan died in Houston in 1908 at age 68. He was not buried in the family vault.
The Donnellan Grave Vault is a large vault made of red brick with a small door in the lower right corner. A fine degree of workmanship is seen in the arched header to doorway which is boarded up with timbers. Located in the bank of Buffalo Bayou under the Franklin Avenue bridge at Louisiana Street, the vault has survived a number of phases of construction along the bayou, including the rechannelization of the mid-1920's.
Remnants of former bridge pilings stand under the modern bridge and a concrete ramp extends from the water line to the base of the vault to prevent erosion from undermining the vault's integrity.
Although all of the remains of the vault were removed and reburied in Glenwood Cemetery by the Wall and Stabe Undertakers on December 3, 1901, the Donnellan Grave Vault endures as an impressive, but little known, monument to an early Houston family.