Old Jefferson Davis Hospital

The Old Jefferson Davis Hospital was built on top of the dead — literally. Houston's 1840 City Cemetery held the town's first buried generations, including Confederate veterans; when the city built its first permanent charity hospital there in 1924, there was no systematic removal of graves — the basement was erected above ground over the cemetery, and the building was named for Jefferson Davis at the veterans' request, honoring the Confederate dead underneath.

The hospital served the city's poor for thirteen years — the first city-county charity hospital, 'a godsend to the afflicted,' with segregated wards — until growth moved it to Allen Parkway in 1937. The old building became everything else: psychiatric hospital, juvenile detention, convalescent ward, records storage, then abandonment — the Classical Revival block standing empty over the graves it was built above, accumulating the ghost lore any hospital-on-a-cemetery would.

The 2005 rehabilitation turned it into loft apartments — residents living over the un-moved cemetery in the building named for the Confederate president. It stands as Houston's strangest reuse: the hospital on the graves, where the basement sits above ground because the dead were never moved out.

The Old Jefferson Davis Hospital is the archive's built-on file — the 1924 charity hospital erected over the 1840 City Cemetery with the graves still below, named for the Confederate dead, abandoned and then lofted over Houston's first dead.