Wilonsky: Finally, restoring the names to the forgotten dead in a Dallas paupers’ cemetery
Daniel Babb has spent a decade among the 2,080 men, women and children buried behind a warehouse.
by Robert Wilonsky, Editorial columnist, Dallas Morning News, Oct 8, 2025
Source: Wilonsky: Finally, restoring the names to the forgotten dead in a Dallas paupers’ cemetery
“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.
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Wilonsky: Finally, restoring the names to the forgotten dead in a Dallas paupers’ cemetery