From Matagorda County History & Genealogy page
Hundreds of former Matagorda County residents lie in their last resting places with no gravestones to prove to the world they existed.
Many cemetery associations have records, but often those records don’t record the exact grave of someone buried in their cemeteries.
Sometimes they know the place, though unmarked, but often there is only a name with no known place.
The graves went unmarked for various reasons.
If the grave was an infant death or an accident, the grief of the family was often too much to bear.
Economic hardship was a common reason.
Many family genealogists have worked to locate those lost graves and mark them so those relatives will not be forgotten.
Such is the case with Patsy Pulis Huffhines and her husband Gene, of Yukon, Okla.
They placed markers on the graves of Tressie Huffhines and Grady Clyde Penland in the Collegeport Cemetery when they visited for Collegeport Day in 2007.
The children had drowned in the bay between Collegeport and Palacios 76 years earlier.
Tressie was the daughter of Adonia Wright and Margaret Fitzgearld Huffhines.
She was staying with her sister, Vannie Huffhines Penland and her family.
Clyde and his brothers were children of Vannie and her husband, Aaron A. Penland.
They were remembered by the family, but the graves were never marked.
Patsy and Gene took on that challenge.
The family was living on the bay in Collegeport in a home built by John Phillips Pierce, son of Jonathan Edwards Pierce of Blessing.
The family lived with the rattlesnakes, alligators and dangers of being on the water.
When the children died March 14, 1931, there were many newspaper accounts that had some inconsistencies.
The following account was written by Elisha Gene Penland, one of Clyde’s brothers.
Gene was in the boat that day and wanted to record a factual account of the events.
Old House on the Bay
It was a bright spring afternoon when myself, three older brothers and Aunt Tressie went down to the bay (Tres Palacios Bay) to play.
Tressie always was kind of an older sister and watched over us younger ones.
We were on the beach and found a wooden skiff washed up on the beach.
Boats often washed up on our side of the bay from the west side, the Palacios side.
We dug it out of the sand began playing with it.
There was a pole in it but no oars so we got in it and pushed it out in the water far enough for it to float with all of us in it.
It also had several feet of old rope on the front of it.
We poled it out a little ways and were having a lot of fun splashing and just goofing around.
To make a long story short, after a while playing, a small squall came up from the southeast.
Normally the squalls are from the west or northwest, from the other shore.
We began floating away from the shore and when Tressie had no control with the pole anymore she took off her boots and got in the water, took the rope and began swimming toward the beach.
She was a very good swimmer.
She got us in far enough to where her feet touched the bottom and was making more headway when brother Clyde stood up on the middle seat and said, “I can swim and I am going to help Tressie.”
He dove in with his rubber boots on and never came up.
Where he went under the only thing that I saw was his little grey cap floating.
And it finally sank also.
To this day when I see a hat or cap in the water I think of that little grey cap and wonder if the person that it belongs to also drowned.
Tressie saw him jump in and came back to get him.
She dove and dove looking for him until she did not come up again.
Each time she came up she said she did not see him and ask Glenn if he had came up.
After searching for Clyde for that period of time we had floated farther away from the beach and the old boat was kind of leaky or we were taking on water from somewhere and Glenn handed Ray Lee one of Tressie’s boots and told him to start dipping out the water.
(In the newspaper article it said that Glenn bailed out the water with an old bucket. I do not remember a bucket, just the boots.)
He had me go up to the front of the boat and he took the other boot and dipped out water with that.
We drifted a long time and we were away out in the middle of the bay.
Glenn and Ray kept bailing water all this time and the waves were getting big.
We finally got to where we could clearly see the tower on the pier where they put storm warning flags and other flags for the fishermen to see.
There were lookouts in that tower that were watching us in the boat and did not know that we were in distress.
Now here is part of the story that no one seems to know about.
Someone - Aaron, Mother or Grandmother - had seen us out in the bay and had run to the field and alerted dad to the situation.
He, dad, took one of the bamboo fishing poles that always stood in the shade of the house and attached a white bedsheet to it and went up on the roof of that old house and began waving the sheet.
I don’t know how he knew that was a distress signal but he did.
Anyhow the lookouts saw it and alerted a fellow with a speedboat and they came out and took us into the speedboat and took us to Palacios.
It was one of those speed boats with the pretty shiny wood decks on front and big engines that roared when they sped up.
They dried us off and wrapped us in warm blankets.
When they found out from Glenn who we were they took us over to the house across the bay by automobile.
I went to sleep in the car and don’t remember getting home.
I woke up the next day and there were many people coming and going from the house.
Mom was in the living room crying with the neighbor ladies and Dad was on the porch greeting people and engaging in a scheme to start a search and Grandma and other ladies were in the dining room and kitchen with food all over the place.
I remember us boys crying that Clyde and Aunt Tressie would not be there anymore.
I did not really understand how dead was dead then.
I was only four years at the time.
The search airplane landed in the pasture and came right up to the yard in front of the house.
He was there several days searching until Clyde was found. Dad even went up with him once.
Aunt Tressie was found washed up on the shore at Coon Island and Clyde was found later by a fellow wading around Grassy Point.
Grassy Point is a spit of marshy land protruding out in the water with no beach south of the slough just south of Collegeport.
I don’t remember them bringing the bodies to the house as the news article said. I really don’t know.
If they had I know that my mom would not have let us younger kids see them. She was protective that way.
I do not remember going to either funeral service, if there were two, but I do remember being at the graveyard and seeing two fresh graves with the earth mounded up and a white board at the end with their names on it.
I know that there was never a headstone put there.
There were people at the graveyard also and I remember our neighbor lady, Mrs. John Ackerman, consoling my mom as she was crying.
For more information on Tressie and Clyde, as well as the Penland family, visit: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txmatago/penland_family_memories2.htm