My Life in Cemeteries

Last week I got to help give away one of those giant-sized checks—you know… like Ed McMahon.  It’s a great feeling to give one of those things away…nothing makes people feel happy like giving them an over-sized check.  The check was actually from the Arkansas Humanities Council and was destined for the Washington Hill Cemetery Association.  The money was a grant to help Washington Hill with their cemetery preservation project as a part of an AHC grant initiative geared at helping to document and preserve endangered African-American cemeteries.  My organization, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, is partners with the AHC in this initiative.  My services are a required, but free, part of the grant process…

The Arkansas Humanities Council gives the Washington Hill Cemetery Association a grant check for their preservation program: Left to right: Ronald Majors (Assoc. Pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church), George Wylie, Juanita Hopson, Gloria Majors, Herman Hopson (with check), Lasaundra Deloach-Williams (Arkansas Humanities Council), Paul Austin (Arkansas Humanities Council), Jamie Brandon, Ora Wylie, and J. A. Hale.

You may remember me talking about my take on cemeteries in earlier posts, but over the last 4 years I have become increasingly involved in cemetery preservation in southwestern Arkansas.  I’m often way behind on these projects, due to my busy schedule…but they are dear to my heart.  Archeology can be a very abstract and esoteric pursuit, but my cemetery projects are an example of concrete “good” that my discipline can do—actually helping real people with real problems.

You can see more pictures from Washington Hill Cemetery and the grant check ceremony on my Flickr page (follow the link below):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157623767580245/

This year two projects have worked to bring the issue of cemetery preservation to the public.  In March, AETN premiered “Silent Storytellers,” a film project by Hop Litzwire and Casey Sanders that explores some of the many issues surrounding cemetery preservation in Arkansas.  This film includes sections on a couple projects that involve the AAS/AHC…and mentions a few cemetery projects here in southwestern Arkansas; including the successful Paraloma Cemetery preservation project in Sevier County, the very endangered Oak Grove Cemetery in Hempstead County and Cedar Grove, a postbellum African-American cemetery in Lafayette County that had to be excavated and relocated by archeologists in the 1980s. You can find out more at the AETN website:

http://www.aetn.org/programs/silentstorytellers/homepage

The second documentary is “Buried Treasures – The Stories of the Bold Pilgrim Cemetery”–a short documentary that looks into the lives and final resting places of African-Americans who migrated to Conway County, Arkansas in the late 1800’s.  AETN has not aired this documentary yet…but you can view it online at:

http://www.aetn.org/programs/silentstorytellers/videoextras/media/buried_treasures_-_thestories_of_the_bold_pilgrim_cemetery

Also…you can see both of these documentaries if you are attending the April 30-May1 workshop put on by the Preservation of African American Cemeteries, Inc. to be held at the University of Arkansas at Monticello…Check out the below link for program details…

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paac/2010paacregform.pdf

I’ll see some of you there…or maybe I’ll run into you in some cemetery in Arkansas.

Dixie Fears

I just had to post a picture of this tombstone found in the Magnolia Cemetery. Metaphorically, Dixie’s fears can be seen as being born sometime in the middle of the Civil War (both Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation happened in 1863 and the tide seemed to be turning against the South) and continue until the middle of the Great Depression (perhaps the election of FDR to a second term in 1936 clamed some of our fears as his National Recovery Administration programs were beginning to make us feel more secure). I guess at that point Dixie died and the New South was born.

In reality, however, this tombstone marks the grave of a member of one of Columbia County’s oldest families–Nattie Hicks Killgore’s History of Columbia County, Arkansas tells me that William Fears served on the county’s first petit jury in 1853 and that Dixie Fears herself was a member of The Ladies Aid Society of the Methodist Protestant Church in 1895.

For more Magnolia Cemetery pictures take a look at my “Magnolia & Surrounds” set on my Flickr account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/77315663@N00/

Virtual Cemeteries

Gregory Vogel has just put up an interesting web application on our Project Past site–he calls it Evergreen Virtual Cemetery, the Preliminary Version.

What Dr. Vogel has done is to make available to a wide public as much information as possible concerning Evergreen Cemetery–a historical cemetery in Fayetteville that he has been using as a teaching laboratory for his Approaches to the Archaeology (ANTH 3023) class for years.

Most of the information was gathered by the over 200 students and about 50 volunteers in the Evergreen Cemetery Recording Project who mapped and recorded, in detail, all permanent features of the cemetery. The mapping and recording are nearly complete, and much of the data has been integrated into a GIS relational database. This information includes a database of all permanent features of the cemetery, including gravestones, footstones, family markers, plot walls and corner markers, benches, permanent flower vases, and unmarked stones. Along with the descriptions, digital photos of most features will soon be available as well.

The GIS-derived map and database are interfaced using MapViewSVG, which is a software package for publishing GIS data on-line in a searchable, interactive format.

You can see a similar project at St. Michael’s Cemetery–an eight-acre cemetery in the heart of Pensacola, Florida. This on-line GIS database was constructed by archaeologists and geographers at the University of West Florida.

These are great first steps to making easily usable databases available to the general public…I’m thinking about attempting this on a larger scale…say, with regional site data (with appropriate safe-guards to insure that locational data will not get into the wrong hands, of course).

I’ll keep you posted.

Tags: archaeology, gis, cemetery