It’s not too late to spend Halloween weekend touring Dallas cemeteries with Preservation Dallas.
Oak Cliff Cemetery, which dates back to at least 1844, is on the tour. Here’s how Preservation Dallas describes it.
It is generally considered the oldest public cemetery in Dallas County, dating back to the 1830s when William Beaty settled here in a vast wilderness with the Trinity River only a short distance away. Today, the Cemetery sits in the shadow of the downtown Dallas skyline. The oldest marked grave is that of the infant Martha Wright, who died in July of 1844. The cemetery fell into disrepair in the 1940s and early 1950s. To remedy this situation, the Oak Cliff Cemetery Association was formed in the late 1950s. The Association is governed by a volunteer board of trustees who see to the upkeep of the common areas of the cemetery. Since the cemetery is not a perpetual care cemetery, individual families maintain their own family lots. Lots in the Cemetery have not been for sale for many decades. Burials are rare, and only conducted when a surviving member of a long-established family plot dies.
The tour starts at Sparkman-Hillcrest at 9 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 30. Tickets cost $30-$40.
The cemetery tour also includes Freedman’s Memorial, Greenwood, McCree, Oakland and Temple Emanu-El cemeteries, as well as Western Heights Cemetery, where the outlaw Clyde Barrow is buried, next to his brother Buck and his parents.
