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Preserving the Past |
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Mobile Register |
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Date: 7/11/2004 |
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By Jean Lakeman Helms |
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Jan Allison spends much of her life working with the Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance, trying to keep Baldwin County's burial grounds from falling into disrepair and dilapidation. |
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"They never should have invented concrete," Allison said recently as she looked at a crumbling concrete grave marker at Twin Beech Cemetery. "Concrete wants to turn back into sand. It wants to be beach." |
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| Allison, along with a Baldwin Register reporter, took a tour of three Eastern Shore cemeteries recently. The three -- Confederate Rest, Twin Beech and Point Clear Cemetery -- are representative of many of Baldwin County's oldest not-for-profit cemeteries, and are among the more than 500 Baldwin County cemeteries that the Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance is seeking to catalog, map and restore, Allison said. Doris Allegri of Fairhope, a genealogist and docent of the Old Methodist Church Museum in Daphne, said that cemeteries are invaluable to those seeking their family history. Grave markers, she said, often give not only the dates but the places where the person was born and died, along with information such as whether he or she served in the military and their children's or parents' names. |
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| "When you have that, you go back to the library and get the census record as to what year he was born," Allegri said. "That way, you can discover where he lived and how many people were in his family and, a lot of times, where his mother and father were born, et cetera." | |
| Some older cemeteries, such as the Confederate Rest cemetery in Point Clear, are well-maintained, with groups such as the American Legion, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans playing an important role in their upkeep, Allison said. Others, like the nearby Point Clear Cemetery, are in bad shape, with some of the grave markers disappearing into the unchecked overgrowth of weeds and trees. The first stop on the tour was Twin Beech Cemetery, which was opened in 1817 and is still in use. Most of the graves here are well-maintained, with markers upright, grass mowed and trash picked up. Some of the older graves, however, are slowly being overgrown by weeds and brush, and many of the markers are made of the dreaded concrete. The problem with concrete is its impermanence, Allison said. Within a few decades, wind and rain can obliterate the writing on concrete grave markers, making it impossible to tell who is buried there. Some of the concrete grave stones were never engraved in the first place, Allison said, making it next to impossible to identify the person buried there. The next stop on the tour was the Confederate Rest Cemetery, located northeast of Scenic Highway 98 near St. Francis Traditional Episcopal Church. Confederate Rest, unlike many of the cemeteries the alliance seeks to protect, is neither dilapidated nor overgrown. The problem here is mostly historical. In the last year of the Civil War, the Point Clear Hotel, now the Marriott Grand Hotel, was converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Many of the soldiers -- both Union and Confederate -- died and were buried in mass graves at what is now Confederate Rest. In 1869, the hotel caught fire, and the names of the soldiers interred there were lost. Recently, however, Allison said, local historians have been searching through old letters, newspaper obituaries and other records, trying to identify the soldiers and place markers with their names near the long trenches where they lie buried. According to the Alabama Cemetery Preservation Alliance, the cemetery contains 412 marked graves and about 300 unmarked trench graves; only 32 of the men buried in those trenches have been positively identified. Confederate soldiers are also buried at Point Clear Cemetery on Ponder Road, but the situation there is even more dire, Allison said. According to the alliance's on-line cemetery register, black Confederate soldiers were exhumed from Confederate Rest in the early 1960s and reinterred here along a back fence, identified only with small metal markers donated by a local funeral home. |
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| Most of those markers are stamped simply "Unknown," Allison said. Four of them have only names, with no dates. Much of the land near the fence has no markings at all, although Allison said it is likely there are graves there as well. | |
| "Nobody's doing any maintenance here, unless somebody has mercy and brings a lawnmower over," Allison said. | |
| Another problem at Point Clear Cemetery, she said, is its location at the end of a cul-de-sac. Trucks that make a wrong turn down the narrow road will sometimes back into the cemetery to turn around, Allison said, and several have hit the picket fence, damaging the gate and knocking the sign to the ground. | |
| "It's a big change from Confederate Rest, isn't it?" Allison said as she surveyed the damage. | |
| "Other cemeteries have vanished altogether," Allison said. | |
| "I have 15 or 20 that I have classified in my database as completely destroyed," Allison said. "They've just been eaten up by Mother Nature." | |
| "Another problem is vandalism," Allison said. | |
| "That is a problem," she said. "It's worse in some areas than in others. You have groups of kids going from one cemetery to another, kicking over gravestones, smashing them up with a crowbar." | |
| Allegri called cemetery vandalism "a shame." | |
| "We lose a lot from kids being destructive and going in the cemeteries and smashing the headstones," Allegri said. | |
| Alabama law makes cemetery vandalism a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $500 fine. If a corpse is disturbed or desecrated, or if the cemetery is an American Indian burial place, the crime rises to a Class C felony, punishable by one to 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine, according to the Alabama Criminal Code. That doesn't seem to deter some people, Allison said. Plundering of Indian burial mounds, often by people using metal detectors to search for souvenirs, is a common occurrence, she said. |
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| "Those mounds are being scavenged," Allison said. "Some of them date back to about 1500. You'd think with that much history they'd want to protect it, but I guess not." | |
| Allison said she is always grateful for help from Boy Scouts or other service groups who pitch in to help clear out brush and tidy up the cemeteries. For example, a few months ago, Boy Scout Troop 49 from Gulf Shores came out to help clean up and preserve the old Benton family cemetery in Bon Secour. Another problem that plagues cemetery preservationists is out-and-out theft. In Mobile, for example, Magnolia Cemetery on Virginia Street lost several valuable pieces of funerary art in October 2001, when thieves broke in and stole gates, fence sections and a white angel. Although many law enforcement agencies report a huge problem with trafficking in stolen funerary art such as urns and sculptures, Allison said she has little to worry about in most of the cemeteries she is watching -- but for an unfortunate reason. |
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| "I don't find anything worth stealing anymore," she said. "It's all been stolen already." | |
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| ACPA Notice: The ACPA Representative for Baldwin County is Jan Allison. If you would like to contact Jan about this article or any cemetery issues in Baldwin County, please visit the ACPA Baldwin County Representative Page for contact information. | |
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Copyright©Alabama
Cemetery Preservation Alliance (ACPA), 2003-2009 |
