On Saturday, September 13, 1919, vacationers crowding the Corpus Christi beaches were warned that a massive hurricane, strengthened over two weeks in the Gulf, was approaching shore, but many ignored the warnings for the last weekend of summer. By Sunday afternoon, buildings on North Beach, battered by winds up to 110 miles per hour and storm tides up to 16 feet, began to break up, and by Monday morning bodies and debris were washing ashore at White Point, coated in black oil from storage tanks near Port Aransas. During the next few days, more than 200 people worked to rescue survivors and recover the dead, bringing bodies to the West Portland schoolhouse on this site, where identification was often impossible because the remains were broken, covered in oil, and sometimes entire families had died. The remains were weighed on a cotton scale and carried almost a mile back toward the beach, where they were buried in a mass grave dug with a slip scraper. More than 30 separate graves were dug from Indian Point near Portland to a point about 20 miles up Nueces Bay, some of the larger graves measuring 1400 feet wide and 3200 feet long. Evidence indicates that about a month later all the bodies were moved to Rose Hill Cemetery in Corpus Christi and to other sites. The official death toll was 284, though estimates, including those lost at sea, placed the actual number at about 1,000, and property damage from the 1919 storm was estimated at about 20 million dollars.
