The Rough Rider at Oakwood

There are some people in Oakwood Cemetery whose stories seem almost too large for one lifetime.

Dr. Carl Lovelace was one of them.

Born in Missouri in 1876, Lovelace arrived in Texas as a boy when his family settled first in Burleson County, then Milam County, before finally making their home in Waco. By the late 1890s, he was part of a rising generation of young Baylor graduates looking outward toward a rapidly changing world.

And then, almost immediately after graduation, the world came calling.

In 1898, Lovelace enlisted in Theodore Roosevelt’s famed Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. One moment, he was a Baylor graduate from Waco — the next, he was in Cuba, advancing through smoke, heat, and confusion during some of the war’s most famous battles, including Las Guasimas, Kettle Hill, and San Juan Hill.

The war itself was brief, but the experience clearly stayed with him for the rest of his life. Lovelace even wrote letters home to Waco describing the realities of combat in Cuba — men moving uphill through dense brush and oppressive heat, often firing toward an enemy they could scarcely see. It brought the war home to readers in Waco in a way newspaper headlines never could.

For most people, that would have been enough adventure for one lifetime. For Carl Lovelace, it was only the beginning.

After the war, he attended Vanderbilt Medical School, trained in Washington, D.C., and then headed to South America, where he worked as a physician connected to the Madeira–Mamoré Railroad — a massive and notoriously dangerous jungle railroad project later nicknamed the “Devil’s Railway.” Disease, exhaustion, and impossible conditions were part of daily life. If Cuba introduced him to war, South America introduced him to survival on an entirely different level.

Eventually, though, Waco pulled him home. Returning to the city that had shaped him, Lovelace practiced medicine before becoming Medical Director for the Amicable Life Insurance Company in the ALICO Building. Along the way, he also served during World War I, attaining the rank of Major in the Army Medical Corps.

But what makes Lovelace especially fascinating is that, despite all the places he traveled and all the history he witnessed, he remained deeply connected to Waco itself. He served as chairman of the Waco Public Library board, sat on the Waco City Commission, and led the James A. Edmond Post of the American Legion. In 1937, when a new social club was formed in Waco, it was Lovelace who suggested the name “Hedonia,” drawn from a Greek word meaning “a happy, joyous life.”

That feels like a telling detail. For a man who had seen war, jungle disease, and loss, it says something that he chose a word centered on joy, fellowship, and living well.

On September 14, 1944, Dr. Carl Lovelace died at his home on Washington Avenue after a lengthy illness, just two months after the death of his wife, Lucile. Two days later, he was buried at OakwoodCemetery beside generations of family who had made Waco their home.

Today, his monument rests quietly among the trees. It would be easy to walk past it without realizing just how far his life carried him — from Missouri to Texas, from Cuba to the Amazon, from wartime battlefields to the civic life of Waco.

But that is part of what makes Oakwood so remarkable. Sometimes the quietest stones hold the biggest stories.