![]() We need to remember the significance of the slaves and soldiers resting beneath our feet. We need spaces in our town that remind us of the persistence and sacrifice of the people who set our community in motion. Riverside Cemetery is one of those places. “Revitalization” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but there are places that we do not need to update but rather preserve. There must be areas and buildings that we value and protect in order to weave the past into our contemporary fabric. If a city is to truly grow in every way, historical preservation is a necessity. Jackson had grown well beyond the original hopes for the early residents. Nearly two hundred years after Mary Jane Butler was buried and Riverside Cemetery was established, current Jacksonians were working to make sure history was preserved. While cleaning up, they found new graves that had been previously unmarked as well as some errors in names and dates. Members of the Jackson city planning department used a survey by Jonathan Smith to attempt to match markers with their burial plots and clean up the cemetery in the best way they could. Hollywood Cemetery was created, followed by Ridgecrest Cemetery, but Riverside remained.įive days later, Riverside Cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and restoration began. The location of cemeteries can mirror the direction of a town’s growth, and, just as the founding fathers of Jackson had hoped, their town evolved and grew to the north and west. The amount of burials at Riverside considerably declined as the community spread. The mixture of black and white, free and captive, choice and obligation, all connected by death and anonymity.Īs Jackson continued to expand into the 1900’s, other cemeteries began to emerge. Here lies the convoluted history of the South still played out in death. There are nearly one hundred unmarked graves of Confederate soldiers and just as many unmarked graves of slaves-the soldier fighting for an ideal that he believed was right, the slave working without a choice in the matter, each of them placed permanently and namelessly in the same ground. Most of all, there is history in a cemetery.Ī public cemetery can be a layer of ironies, just one being the neighboring of individuals of opposite status, now forever equalized under the earth. A cemetery is one of the only places in the universe where a living person is the minority in that given location. They are one of the few places in our world where we can walk the line between two planes of existence. Cemeteries are extremely peaceful places. However, as I’ve aged, the fascination with cemeteries has grown. Nothing ever good happened in those stories and, from a young age, the negative association with cemeteries was seamlessly transferred. ![]() The earliest ghost stories I heard sitting around a campfire in Arkansas used a cemetery as the primary setting. The inevitability becomes a reality night falls on what was, hopefully, a long, bright day of life and the body rests beneath the cemetery floor for generations to come.Ĭemeteries have always been fascinating, if not horrifying, for me. Then, they’re lowered into the ground from where the first man was created. We decorate our loved ones with fine jewelry and a new suit or dress to say our inevitable goodbyes. We polish those permanent boxes until they shine like a new Cadillac. Death is dressed up with colorful flowers and immaculate granite.
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