The first 50 entries took 70 minutes to complete, which translates into nearly 24 hours of continuous work for the full set of names. To help streamline the process, the information has now been organized into an Excel file that arranges each name into the 3 to 4 rows used on the markers. This should significantly increase the pace of data entry, and with it, bring the project closer to completion.

Even with these improvements, entering the information will still take a few weeks. Once submitted, the headstones will move into a 3 to 6 month production timeline. Because each one is a custom size, they must be individually cut and polished before the sandblasting can begin.

Destiny is currently exploring whether the information can be submitted in batches of 100. If so, production could begin sooner, allowing these markers to take shape without delay. More updates will be shared as soon as that option becomes clear.

This is meticulous work, but it is meaningful work, and every step ensures that those laid to rest are honored with the dignity and accuracy they deserve.

Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

Then Randolph spoke, his voice low. “I stopped by Parkland today,” he said, eyes fixed on the flame. “To see Uncle Will.”

Armenda’s fork paused mid-air. “How is he?”

Randolph shook his head slowly. “Not good. They’ve got him in isolation now. You should’ve seen the precautions! They don’t let you near a man with this sickness without a mask. Just a strip of gauze tied across my mouth, but it’s something. I kept my distance, didn’t touch a thing. The nurse cracked the window wide open so the air could move. They say that’s the only way to keep the germs from hanging in the room.”

He pushed his plate away, hands trembling slightly. “I washed my hands till they burned before I left. Didn’t dare take a sip of water while I was there. Everything he touched, everything in that room… it’s dangerous. This disease! It floats in the air when he coughs. You breathe it in, and it settles deep in your lungs. That’s how it starts.”

Armenda reached for his hand, her eyes wide with worry. Randolph squeezed back gently. “I had to see him,” he whispered. “But Lord, I pray I didn’t bring anything home.”

He leaned back, staring at the candle as if it held answers. “They say it’s a slow march. It started with pneumonia last summer, then toxemia and his pleural effusion on New Year’s Day. Since then, nothing but downhill. I feel so helpless, Armenda. He was more of a father to me than my own daddy. We all came here from Paris thinking Dallas was our bright future. Now…” His voice cracked. “Now I’m watching him slip away.”

The Call

Two days later, Valentine’s warmth had faded into a gray February morning. Randolph clocked in at the Sears building on Lamar Street. It was a sprawling 1.5 million square foot monument to commerce just South of Downtown Dallas. He was barely settled when his boss approached. “Phone call for you,” the man said, his tone clipped.

Randolph’s stomach tightened. He walked the long corridors slowly, dread pressing down with every step. At the switchboard, he lifted the receiver, his voice barely a whisper. “This is Randolph.”

The words that followed shattered him. A Parkland orderly delivered the news in a single, merciless sentence: Will was gone.

Randolph fell to his knees, sobbing, the sound swallowed by the hum of machinery and footsteps. His world had collapsed, but there was no time for grief. Jobs were scarce, and his straw boss wasn’t known for mercy. He wiped his face, stood up, and finished his shift hollowed out by loss.

That night, he walked to his uncle’s home at 1819 Lincoln Street to gather what little remained before it was discarded. Among the belongings, he found a photograph of the two of them at a church barbecue back in Paris, TX. It was a moment of joy frozen in time. He tucked it into his coat and began the long walk back to the prestigious address of 3736 Stanford Avenue, in University Park, more than an hour on foot. When he arrived, he didn’t walk through the front door, but through the alley and into the servants’ quarters.

Dallas was tightly segregated at this time, and he would never be allowed to enter through the front door of this home. That was for the white white people. Instead, he was tucked into the servants’ quarters buried deep behind a grand estate. His wife, Armenda, was a domestic for the family that owned the property. Their apartment didn’t have running water or electricity. It wasn’t much, but it was theirs, and in the depths of the Depression, that counted for something.

Exhausted and late for dinner Randolph finally came through the door. Armenda saw the bundle in his arms and instantly knew what happened. She rushed to him, and as he tried to explain, he pulled out the photo and dissolved into tears.

The Burial

Will Dawkins had been the first in their family born free. His life deserved dignity. But dignity was hard to come by in 1932. Plans for Mount Auburn Cemetery fell through. Forest Lawn was considered, then abandoned. In the end, there was no choice but the pauper’s cemetery. Most were buried there the same day they died. Will waited three days, a measure of the family’s anguish and torture at not being able to provide funds for his burial.

On February 16, Randolph and Armenda traveled far north of town to lay him to rest. The place was called Letot, TX. The City & County of Dallas had banded together to purchase this new tract of land that would house their needs for decades to come. Randolph remarked to the grave digger, “I thought this was a cemetery.” To which the reply came, “It is now.” Will was the very first burial at Dallas City Cemetery.

The land was pristine, acres of open country. Standing at the edge of the grave, Randolph clutched the photograph in his coat pocket, the last tangible piece of a man who had shaped his life. The wind swept across the fields, carrying with it the silence of things left unsaid.

This wasn’t the ending they dreamed of when they left Paris, TX for Dallas. But in that moment, with Armenda’s hand in his, Randolph vowed to keep Will’s memory alive. Because even in the shadow of despair, love endures.

Will Dawkins was born in 1888 to a freedman named Nathan who was just 12 at the time the Civil War ended. The parents fled the plantations of South Carolina and brought Samuel (15), Nathan (12) and, Roda (8) to Paris, TX to start a new life. There they gave birth to at least 5 more children: Harriett, Sanford, Rachel, Clarksville & Lewis. It was in Paris that they were finally able to legally wed in 1873.

Note: The houses on Lincoln and Stanford no longer stand.

Today marks a turning point! Not just for a forgotten cemetery in Northwest Dallas, but for the 2,054 people who were laid to rest there without the dignity of a lasting marker. After years of research, advocacy, and quiet persistence, the City of Dallas has released $90,000 to help fund the purchase of 1,000 new headstones for Dallas City Cemetery, also known as the Dallas Pauper’s Cemetery. They were matching the $50,000 of private donations already allocated to the effort.

A Personal Note

Today also happens to be my birthday, and I can’t imagine a better gift than this. After years of research, advocacy, and quiet determination, to receive the funding that will finally give 1,000 people their names back feels like the most meaningful birthday present I could ever receive. It’s a reminder that history isn’t just something we study; it’s something we can change.

As soon as the funds clear my bank, they will be transferred directly to Calvary Hill Cemetery, fulfilling the contract I signed on September 30, 2025. On that same day, I will deliver the list of the 1,000 individuals whose stories will finally be anchored to the ground where they rest.

And then the work begins.

While the markers are being created, I’ll be sharing regular stories about the cemetery’s permanent residents — the people whose lives, struggles, and final days shaped the early 20th‑century city we inherited. They deserve to be known. They deserve to be remembered.

A Cemetery That Tells the Story of a City

They say there are a million stories in the naked city. Dallas City Cemetery is no exception. In fact, it may be one of the most concentrated archives of human experience in the entire county.

A staggering 84% of all burials occurred in the cemetery’s first decade, from 1932 to 1942 — years defined by the Great Depression, widespread poverty, and the absence of modern medical care. As prenatal care progressed, antibiotics emerged, and tuberculosis treatments improved, the burial rate dropped sharply. The cemetery’s population is a demographic snapshot of a city in crisis, then in transition.

Most Common Places of Death

• 1,002 – Parkland Hospital/Woodlawn (including 278 stillborn)

• 177 – Bradford Memorial Hospital

• 116 – Hutchins Convalescent Home

• 75 – St. Paul

• 43 – Baylor Hospital

• 21 – Hope Cottage

These institutions cared for the city’s poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable residents, and their records form the backbone of this cemetery’s story.

Unnatural Deaths

Among the 2,054 burials, 171 were attributed to external or unnatural causes, a sobering reminder of the dangers of early‑20th‑century urban life.

• Homicide: 24

• Suicide: 18

• Drowning: 8

• Burns: 29

• Poisoning: 16

• Train/Railroad incidents: 19

• Explicitly “Accidental”: 9

• Stab/Knife wounds: 9

• Hanging/Strangulation: 7

• Exposure: 5

• Gun-related (subset): 31

Each number represents a life cut short, often violently or tragically — and until now, often anonymously.

What Comes Next

The die is cast, but the story is still unfolding.

Over the coming months, as the markers are carved and prepared, I’ll be sharing the histories of the people who will soon have their names restored to the landscape. Some stories will be heartbreaking. Some will be surprising. Many will challenge assumptions about poverty, race, illness, and survival in Dallas during the hardest years of the 20th century.

But all of them will remind us why this work matters.

A cemetery is not just a place of burial. It is a record of a community’s values — and for too long, Dallas allowed this one to fade into obscurity. Today, with this funding, with these markers, and with this renewed commitment to remembrance, we take a step toward correcting that.

Alea iacta est.
The die is cast.
And the work of restoration — of memory, of dignity, of history — moves forward.

I am immensely humbled by this moment and I’m flipping back and forth between the gravity of what we are about to do and the joy of being able to finally roll up my sleeves and get to work!

Please subscribe to this blog so that we can enjoy this journey together!

For posterity’s sake, I’m reposting the article in case the link stops working someday. I was surprised it still worked when I went to it today, because it was almost 6 years ago.

Original Article:

‘No one cared about them in life or death’: Why one man fights to restore Dallas’ old paupers cemetery

Until Dan Babb came along, no one even knew how many people are buried there (2,053, to be exact)

Robert Wilonsky Editorial columnist, Dallas Morning News, Dec 25, 2019

Vernon Johnson’s grave marker is wrong. First, because that is not Vernon Johnson buried beneath it.

Buried here is the infant daughter of Vernon Johnson and Virgie Chandler, who once lived on South Austin Street in the Cedars. The marker also says this child was born Dec. 25, 1932, and died the same day. But that is not what happened. The girl was actually born at 10:30 p.m. Christmas Eve, at Parkland Hospital, and died three hours later, at 1:40 Christmas morning.

“Born premature,” said Dan Babb. I was astounded that a 54-year-old man raised in northwest Dallas would know even a single thing about a child born 87 years ago who lived for 190 minutes, much less her very brief life’s story.

The child’s mother was just 6½ months along when the baby was born, Babb said as we knelt in the dirt and grass and stared at faded letters stamped into a thin piece of metal nailed to a crumbling concrete block. “Remember,” he said, “this was during the Depression.” And, during an outbreak of illnesses that killed hundreds of children here in the 1930s.

“This cemetery,” Babb said, “speaks to a lot of different things.”

This cemetery is the old pauper’s cemetery, buried, as it were, inside a warehouse district off Walnut Hill Lane near Denton Drive. And here, it’s not at all uncommon to find markers with wrong or misspelled names or inaccurate dates of birth and death. That is, when you can find the markers at all.

The Dallas City Cemetery, it’s called on Google Maps, a rectangle of quiet green surrounded on all sides by motor and moving and construction companies. It’s seemingly impossible to find — only a small white sign marks the entrance — and difficult to access down the end of a narrow white-dirt road that ends in 3 acres of what looks like pastureland.

There once was a large metal sign over this land that read “DALLAS CITY CEMETERY,” but it appears to have been thrown away. Part of the fencing has vanished. And an adjacent alleyway is overgrown and causes the land to flood, which is why part of the ground is muddy and, often, underwater — the corner where 256 infants who died in 1932 and 1933 are buried.

Babb says there are 2,053 people buried here, off Shady Trail Drive. And you would never know it, save for 1,000 or so remaining markers — the tintype nailed to concrete — that have survived the devastation wrought by erosion and lawnmowers.

“Might as well be a Civil War battlefield,” Babb, a graduate of W.T. White High School, said as we scanned the vista, unable to see a single marker from the narrow entrance. “Nothing.”

The city bought this burial ground from Forest Lawn Cemetery, nearby on Walnut Hill and Harry Hines Boulevard, in the early 1930s, when this part of the city was unincorporated and called Letot, and Dallas needed virgin land in which to bury the dead claimed by illnesses born of “economic distress,” as this newspaper put it then. Dallas made it a “special use park” in 1968, and stopped burying people here eight years later. In the summer of 1978, City Hall sold off 10 unused acres to the industrial uses that now crowd around it.

Every now and then, a story like this one will be told about the city’s abandoned dead and the flooding and how awful that is, because it is awful. But its existence remains unknown to most. I paid my first visit just last week, drawn by the small, strange red-and-white sign I noticed out the corner of my eye while touring the October tornado’s devastation along Shady Trail.

The internet sent me to Babb’s website, where he has begun chronicling tales of the dead buried without a penny or family. I read there, too of his passion to restore the place — “this time piece of Dallas’ history,” he writes. I called Babb on Tuesday night, and he offered to meet me there Wednesday morning, at the place that consumes most of his spare time when he’s not working at a software company.

Babb, a genealogist by hobby, calls it an obsession. “My husband,” he said, “calls it an addiction.”

But why this place, this almost abandoned potters field?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just walked in and was like, ‘Somebody needs to do something about this,’ and I set about doing it. I honestly never thought it was going to be this much work. Maybe I’m a little crazy. But this is my cemetery.” He paused, grinned. “Well, no one is fighting me for it right now, anyway.”

For his diligence, we should be grateful; so, too, the relatives of the forgotten and misidentified dead often relegated to this last-chance resting place by family members and “uncaring people,” as its former caretaker told this newspaper in 1977. They would otherwise have been erased from history had Babb not found this place three years ago and made it his cause and calling.

Since he became the cemetery’s unofficial caretaker, he and a small army of volunteers have scoured the grounds with metal detectors to find nameplates shorn off by weather and groundskeepers. They have pored through endless death certificates and maps to match names and correct what coroners and careless workers got wrong — or ignored altogether — when no one was paying attention.

Babb has posted to the Find a Grave website more than 1,000 photos of the markers that do remain. And, as a result, he has even reunited a handful of the living with the dead who have not been visited since they were covered with dirt decades ago.

“It’s amazing what Dan is doing,” said Omar Narvaez, the Dallas City Council member whose West Dallas district stretches into this part of the northwest. “But there are people for whom this is important, meaningful, powerful. Honoring those who have passed is how we secure our history and our future.”

Narvaez knew nothing of this land until Babb introduced it to him three years ago. When he first saw the cemetery, he said this week, it was “a big surprise.” And, he said, “there was some shock — how did we let something like this go into such disrepair?”

In the 1970s, this was one of a handful of abandoned cemeteries that fell to the Park and Recreation Department’s care; staff estimates maybe $6,000 is spent here annually, about what City Hall spends each year on the rotting Reverchon Park baseball field. In recent days, parks staff pulverized a tree stump in the cemetery’s floodplain, but even without recent rains the infants’ graves still lie far, far below the mud and stagnant water.

Oscar Carmona, a longtime assistant parks director about to decamp for the top job in Raleigh, N.C., said this week that there was a recent meeting with parks, Dallas Water Utilities and Public Works to discuss finally solving the flooding problem that dates to at least 2004. But that work stalled out — why, Carmona can’t say. Miscommunication, perhaps.

“Or maybe someone was daydreaming during that meeting,” he said.“This is a process that has taken too long, in my opinion, especially since we have a volunteer willing to be a caretaker or steward,” said Carmona with the bluntness of someone walking out the door. “I hate that the city is making him wait while we get our stuff together. I would like this cemetery to be a classroom into the history of Dallas. And I would like for people to say Dallas takes care of its past.”

Babb has plans for this paupers cemetery — and a price tag. He would like to add to each gravesite a new marker — a black marble brick with the deceased’s correct name and dates of birth and death, for starters. Such an effort would cost around $40,000, and he has already raised about one-third of that through quiet, limited efforts.

“It is my hope to turn this back into a place of rest,” Babb said as we walked the cemetery. “Right now, I feel it’s a place of torture.”

“Torture?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, rich or poor, everyone wants to have peace in the afterlife,” he said. “Having your grave flooded nine months out of the year is not peaceful. Having your loved ones unable to find you is not peaceful. It’s a tragedy not just that they died in poverty, but that no one cared about them in life, no one cared about them in death and no one has cared about them since.”

No, not until now.

By Robert Wilonsky

Robert Wilonsky is Dallas Morning News editorial columnist.

“I spend more time with the dead than the living,” Daniel Babb said Saturday afternoon as we sat beneath a tree in a paupers’ cemetery stashed behind Northwest Dallas warehouses.

“How fortunate,” I said, as the dead might be better company these days.

There was a slight breeze, teasing at the autumn yet to arrive. A few feet away, beneath another tree, someone had laid a tattered blanket and a threadbare pillow, likely one of the homeless who occasionally come back here to sleep undisturbed among the more than 2,000 men, women and children — so many children — buried beneath this three acres of prairieland beginning 93 years ago.

I hadn’t visited the cemetery since December 2019, shortly after a tornado tore through this warehouse district. I was driving one afternoon among the ruins along Shady Trail Drive, between Walnut Hill Lane and Northwest Highway, when I noticed a small, white city of Dallas sign for the “City Paupers Cemetery” posted in a grassy walkway between two nondescript office-warehouse complexes.

Behind one complex sits what was once called the Dallas City Cemetery. Here, from 1932 to 1978, the city and county buried those who died without family, without friends, without money. But even now it looks like no cemetery you’ve ever seen: Scant markers can be found in the tall grass. And those that remain are small and often unreadable, some with misspelled names and occasionally wrong birth and death dates stamped on business-card-size pieces of tin nailed to concrete.

A little digging sent me to the website of Babb, a 60-year-old graduate of W.T. White High School and a genealogist who, over the last eight years, has become the unofficial caretaker and historian of this hallowed ground, one of 11 old cemeteries under the purview of the Park and Recreation Department.

Last week, now-former Park Board member Tim Dickey texted to let me know that there had been “a significant development” at the cemetery.

Dickey directed me to something Babb posted on his website, beneath the heading “A Watershed Moment for Dallas City Cemetery.” There, Babb revealed that “after nearly a decade of quiet persistence, heartbreak, and hope,” he had cobbled together enough money to purchase and plant 1,000 granite headstones with the city’s blessing (after a lot of paperwork).

Babb managed to raise $140,000, including $50,000 from private donations, another $40,000 from a Park Department matching grant and $50,000 more from former council member Omar Narvaez, who once told me he was stunned to learn of the cemetery and appalled the city had let it fall into such disrepair.

Robert Wilonsky

The headstones were ordered just last week, hours before a tariff went into effect that would have increased the price exponentially. Babb hopes to begin installing them come spring.

There’s also $150,055 in 2017 bond money meant to alleviate flooding along a warehouse wall, where, for about eight months out of the year, standing water drowns the graves of more than 250 children. That project appears stalled, according to the city’s website.

The city spends a pittance to keep it mowed — a few thousand dollars each year. On Saturday it was clear that crews hadn’t been out there for a long time. A bollard that stops cars from driving into the cemetery was missing. The grass was high, obscuring trash strewn across the cemetery, including a seemingly endless length of knifed-open black tubing from which thieves had stolen copper wires.

And in the back, along a fence separating the cemetery from construction equipment, there was a makeshift shelter big enough to sleep several people.

I asked John Jenkins, director of the Park Department, why the flooding project has been delayed. He blamed the high turnover and heavy workload at the Public Works department for the delay (“They have their priorities, too”), but said he would get crews out there immediately to replace and lock the missing bollard.

“It’s unique for us to have a partner like this with a cemetery, but it’s certainly warranted,” Jenkins said this week. “It’s amazing the work he’s doing out there, his commitment. These are folks who don’t have any families around. Daniel and the folks he’s gotten involved are their families now, there to give them the proper respect. He’s not trying to get publicity. That’s unique. That’s special. He’s one of a kind. And he has done this city a great service.”

Erosion, flooding, lawnmowers and decades of inattention have almost completely erased the names of the dead interred here, many of whom died from the tuberculosis outbreak that prompted the creation of Woodlawn Hospital in 1936. Their names, and their stories, were recovered using old maps stored at the downtown library; an incomplete and often inaccurate list of the interred posted to the web; researchers who volunteered countless hours to dig up birth and death certificates and old newspaper stories; and an army of people carrying metal detectors to locate the markers.

“The harshest ones to read are ‘Baby X, 1961,’ things like that,” Babb said. I asked how old that child might have been. “It’d probably be a day,” he said.

On Saturday, as we sat on high ground that used to be the path into and through the cemetery, Babb could point in any direction and tell you who is buried where and how they came to rest here.

Like Troy Wampler, buried in the far corner of the cemetery after he was robbed and shot in the chest and head in the spring of 1974, likely because he was a white man with a Black girlfriend. Cemetery records and old newspaper stories had his name spelled “Wanpler” until Babb realized a mistake had been made.

Babb motioned toward the unmarked grave of Ann Johnson, likely the daughter of South Carolina slaves. She was likely born in 1854 — not 1842, as cemetery records show — and buried in 1938 in the Black section of the cemetery. Researcher Marilyn Kosanke discovered that Ann’s son, Charles, is also buried in the Dallas City Cemetery.

Babb then motioned toward the ground where Mabel Adkins is buried, claimed by hepatitis on Nov. 2, 1935, at St. Paul’s Hospital. And over there, he said, is where William Dawkins was laid to rest in February 1932. Dawkins was the first person among 2,080 to be buried in this paupers’ cemetery.

“In genealogy, there’s this thing called collecting dead relatives,” Babb said. “It’s getting the dates of their births, their marriages, their deaths. It’s knowing things about them — finding where they worked and where they lived, which is often contained in the death certificates, and who they married. You can then start to put meat on those bones and, in a way, bring them back to life.”

There are a few modern headstones here, installed by family members who eventually found their relatives in the potter’s field, likely using the arduously updated Find a Grave website. One grave is adorned with a small Christmas tree made of wire, a reminder of the family’s annual pilgrimage to the paupers’ cemetery.

“A person experiences a second death when the last person speaks their name,” Babb said. “Right now, most of these people have experienced their second deaths, and I’m trying to erase that.”

Please go read the full article here as every click matters!
Wilonsky: Finally, restoring the names to the forgotten dead in a Dallas paupers’ cemetery

Once those funds are received and forwarded to Calvary Hill Cemetery, they will place the formal order for the stones that will resemble the rendering below. The prices are locked in at this point, so there should be no further price increases that will hinder our progress for these markers.

Fresh Canvas of visible undamaged markers

In the meantime, I’ll be selecting the exact markers to be reproduced. Priority will be placed on those whose markers have been lost or are unable to be seen due to sinking/erosion.

I’ll be heading to the cemetery this weekend to see which ones are still intact so they can be excluded from the order to make our money stretch as far as possible.

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)

I’ll be seeking to have a GPR survey of Blocks 24 & 26 (the far-right corner as you approach the cemetery from the Gravel Drive), to create a full accounting of unidentified graves. Every marker in this sparsely occupied section of the cemetery will need to be replaced so that they will not hide under leaves and debris.

We already know of 3 people whose permanent markers were never installed, because we found the remnants of their temporary markers buried in the soil during our original survey. We just don’t know how many more there might be.

Once located, we will be contacting the Texas Historical Commission to inform them of the unmarked graves, as is required by State Law.

Producing/Shipping of the Markers

The markers will be created in China. This was not my wish, but it turns out that the rest of the world doesn’t have adequate manufacturing facilities to mass produce the needed quantities. They will be cut polished and inscribed, before being shipped. The transit time is approximately 18-27 days. Then they will go through customs and be shipped by Common Carrier where they will finally be dropped just inside the cemetery entrance (which is fortunately free of burials).

Goods shipped from Xiamen, China to Dallas, TX via boat and truck will travel approximately 8,389 miles in total:

• By sea: ~11,200 km (≈ 6,963 miles) from Xiamen to Los Angeles

• By truck: ~2,300 km (≈ 1,426 miles) from Los Angeles to Dallas

The Fun Part Begins!

Once onsite, we hope to have a forklift distribute the pallets along the central driveway near the Blocks where they will finally be placed. At this time, we can bring volunteers in who will work with Forest Lawn Cemetery to prepare and place them in their new permanent home. Each stone will be photographed with GPS coordinates and uploaded to Findagrave.com so that the world can continue to speak their names. For you are not truly dead until the last person utters your name.

The Dallas City Cemetery, known to few and visited by even fewer, is not a place of grandeur. Hidden behind warehouses, obscured by development, and ravaged by time, it has long stood as a silent witness to suffering. It is the final resting place for over 2,000 people—many of whom died alone, unnamed, and unclaimed. Their stories are not found in textbooks or museum exhibits. They are etched into the soil, whispered through the rusted markers, and carried in the wind that sweeps through the overgrown grass.

Today, that silence was broken.

The Babb Family Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, has received final approval from the City of Dallas and contracted the purchase of the first 1,000 new granite headstone markers—each one a testament to a life once lived. These 12x8x4” stones will be placed just beneath the original concrete and metal markers, for those that still exist, anchoring memory in permanence. I serve as the Project Manager for this rescue effort.

This moment was made possible by:

• A $50,000 deposit from privately raised funds.

• A $40,000 matching grant from the Dallas Parks Department.

• An additional $50,000 from the 2017 Dallas Bond Funds, secured through the tireless efforts of Councilperson Omar Narvaez and his former Chief of Staff, now District 6 Councilperson, the Honorable Laura Cadena.

Their belief in this mission helped navigate the maze of bureaucracy and bring light to a place long shrouded in darkness. I also owe a profound debt of gratitude to Tim Dickey, Area 5 Coordinator for the Dallas Parks Department. His unwavering support and shared passion kept me going when the odds felt insurmountable.

I also need to thank Reggie Cusick who harnessed 3 different local metal detectorist organizations and brought 50+ detectorists to help us find the 2000 plus graves and most importantly to locate almost 500 dislodged nameplates that were floating around the cemetery, often just out of view. There are times that the paper trail failed us and if not for these important finds we could never have produced the most far reaching and accurate accounting ever conducted in this cemetery. In all I counted over 90 volunteers with hundreds of service hours between them. We can now accurately account for 99.9% of the burial locations for the 2060 known residents.

This cemetery is not just a patch of land. It is a mirror of our city’s soul. It holds the stories of those lost to tuberculosis, malnutrition, dementia, poverty, and the Great Depression. It holds the unnamed, the unclaimed, and the unsupported. It holds the people who built Dallas from the margins—quietly, invisibly, and without recognition.

Since the first burial of Will Dawkins on February 19, 1932, this ground was meant to be a place of peace. But erosion, faulty marker designs, and a lack of planning turned it into a place of confusion and decay. Today, less than 25% of graves are accessible to family members. The most frequent visitors are not mourners, but Parks Department crews fighting a losing battle against time and terrain.

But now, the tide is turning.

These new markers are more than stone. They are names reclaimed, lives honored, and histories remembered. They are a promise that no one is too forgotten to be mourned. That no life is too small to be marked. That dignity does not depend on wealth, fame, or family—but on our collective willingness to remember.

This is not the end of the journey. It is the beginning of healing. A beginning where the Dallas City Cemetery becomes a place worth visiting—not just to grieve, but to learn. To reflect. To honor.

Because Dallas was not built solely by its founders and visionaries. It was shaped by every soul laid to rest here. And today, we begin to say: We see you. We remember you. You mattered.