Cemetery Tour

As many of you know, I love history.  When I travel around I like to find out about the places I'm visiting.  Every place has something interesting about it.  When we travel for pleasure, my first thought is to get the 'lay of the land' by taking a city tour - one the points out all the places of interest.  After our last vacation, I realized that I'd never taken a city tour of Dallas and I've been here since 1980!  I looked for a city tour on line and found that there weren't any.  Shame on you, Dallas!

What I did find, however, was the Dallas Historical Society.  They offer very interesting tours like the one I took a couple of weeks ago.  This particular tour is called the Cemetery Tour.  It's not what I expected - it was better.

Our tour started at Greenwood Cemetery located right in the heart of Dallas.  It's in Uptown on Oak Grove Road (right off of Central Expressway).  I never even knew it was there.  This is the oldest cemetery in Dallas.

This was a really neat headstone.  It looks like a tree trunk.  When you see this type of headstone, it means the the person buried is a member of a fraternal organization that began in 1883 called Woodman of the World.  Oddly, they are insurance salesman.

This is Francis.  She was our tour guide.  She's 90, which surprised me.  I would have guessed 60's.  She's been in Dallas since the 1920's and knows all kinds of stuff related to the cemeteries in Dallas.  This has earned her the nickname 'the Cemetery Lady'.  She was awesome!

There are lots of veterans of the Civil War buried here.  All of the Confederate soldiers' graves are marked by this little metal marker that designates the person as a Civil War veteran.

 We talked Mom & Dad into going with us. 

 This is the section of the cemetery where the Union soldiers are buried.

There's a huge vacant space in the cemetery that is covered with trees.  Some Dallas developers wanted to buy the land and build on it.  Francis fought the developers (of whom Roger Staubach was one) and told them they couldn't develop on the land because there were burials.  When the developers had an archaeological dig, they found 14 bodies buried there so they stopped.  The bodies (probably just skeletons at this point) were re-interred in this one spot.  The previous graves were unmarked so they don't know who is buried here.

Several of Dallas' original settlers are buried here.  This mausoleum is built for Christopher Columbus Slaughter.  Colonel Slaughter was a cattle rancher and a philanthropist.

Here, Francis was describing the dedication ceremony for the historical marker.  Note the Civil War marker next to the historical marker.

This section of the cemetery is for the Cockrell family.  Sarah Horton Cockrell was one a Dallas entrepreneur.  Her husband, Alexander Cockrell, had several businesses for which Sarah kept all the records.  When Alexander was killed, Sarah took over the businesses full time.  She commissioned the first bridge over the Trinity River.  By 1892, she owned about 1/4 of downtown Dallas and several thousand acres in Dallas County.  The tall obelisk monument is Sarah's grave. 

 This plot belongs to the Cabell family.  This would be the same Cabell family to which Earl Cabell (of the Earl Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas) belongs.  Earl Cabell was the mayor of Dallas during the time that JFK was here.

After the Greenwood Cemetery, we all drove around the corner to the Freedman's Cemetery.  I've driven by this place a million times and never knew it was a cemetery.  I always thought it was a park.

This cemetery was a burial ground for many of the freed slaves that had settled here after the Civil War.  When they began excavating in the preparation for the widening of Central Expressway, they found a skeleton every time they put the shovel in the ground.  There weren't many markers.  Francis, our tour guide, was part of the project and she said there was only one marker that they found.  The marker is embedded in the wall behind the statue.

This is a view of the whole cemetery.  It's really beautiful.  It's right off Central.

The cemetery tour was only about 2 hours long.  We only hit a few highlights of the cemetery.  I think Francis could probably have talked all day.  After the tour, we went to Gonzalez Restaurant on Jefferson for some outstanding Mexican food. 

The Dallas Historical Society has several other really cool tours.  If you're interested go to their website.  www.dallashistory.org then click on the Historic City Tours link.