Peckerwood Hill
Excerpts from crime writer Ron Franscell:
HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- A shroud of low, ashen mist swathes Peckerwood Hill on a corpse-cold day in Texas.
No matter. Rev. Carroll Pickett knows the spot he seeks. The ground is spongy with night rain, sunken in some places where cheap pine-box coffins have rotted and collapsed, so he walks respectfully among the dead. A plastic grocery sack flutters in the highest branches of a yellow pine, a ghost guard keeping watch over nearly 3,000 dead, indigent criminals Texas has buried here for the past 160 years.
The history of the American death penalty is written across the handmade concrete headstones on Peckerwood Hill, Texas’ biggest and oldest prison cemetery. It is as much an artifact of capital punishment as “Old Sparky,” the Texas electric chair, now a museum piece.
More condemned men - 180 - are buried here than 29 other states have executed in their entire history. Most share the ignominy of a nameless tombstone marked only with their inmate number, a death date and a simple “X” … executed. ...
The dead on Peckerwood Hill are past caring. This place smells and feels different from other graveyards. It’s dark and sour, as if bad men decay into bad earth. Not all were executed, but all were criminals doing time. The memories here aren’t happy, and few mourners leave flowers, much less celebrate wasted lives. And Peckerwood Hill is little more than a 22-acre potter’s field, since these dead prisoners had no money nor family willing to claim their corpses.
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