Charlotte Ganahl Walker (1878-1958)

    Charlotte Walker, actress, was born in Galveston to Edwin A. and Charlisa (De Ganahl) Walker and was the mother of character actress Sara Haden. Walker made her stage debut as a teen, when at nineteen she performed in London, England in a comedy called The Mummy. She performed with Richard Mansfield and later returned to her native Texas. She appeared as June in Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1911 and would later reprise the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film Trail of the Lonesome Pine. David Belasco noticed her in On Parole and signed her for starring roles in plays The Warrens of Virginia, Just a Wife, and Call The Doctor. In 1923 she played with Ethel Barrymore in The School For Scandal, produced by the Player's Club.

    Walker's motion picture career began in 1915 with Kindling and Out of the Darkness. Sloth (1917) is a five-reeler which features Walker. In the third reel of this film she plays a youthful Dutch maid who is about sixteen years old. The setting is an old Dutch settlement on Staten Island, New York. The theme stresses the perils of indolence to a nation of people and cautions against permitting luxury to replace the simplistic life led by America's forebears. In her later silent film work Walker can be seen in The Midnight Girl (1925) starring alongside a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. The Midnight Girl is one of Walker's few silents that survives. As a film actress she continued to perform in films into the early 1930s. Her later screen performances include roles in Lightnin' (1930), Millie (1931), Salvation Nell (1931), and Hotel Variety (1933) She married her first husband, Dr. John B. Haden, on November 16, 1896 in New York City. With him she had two daughters, Beatrice Shelton  and Katherine, who later changed her name to Sara Haden. After her divorce, she returned to the stage. Her second husband, Eugene Walter, was a playwright who adapted the novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine for Broadway; the second marriage also ended in divorce in 1930. Charlotte Walker died in 1958 at a hospital in Kerrville, Texas at age 81.

Note: Crypt is unmarked. There are several crypts inside the Haden family mausoleum, all marked with a small nameplate except for two - those of Charlotte and her daughter Sara.

Haden Mausoleum

Trinity Episcopal Cemetery

Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.621, -094° 48.682