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Cemeteries are often associated with ghosts and ghouls, but they evoke fond memories for Betsy Farris. As a child, she feasted on fried chicken, potato salad and warm pear cobbler under the trees in Owens Chapel Cemetery in Danner, Texas, where her father’s parents and grandparents were interred.
Still held annually on the last Sunday in June, the potlucks in rural Fannin County honor the dead while reuniting people whose ancestors are buried there. “You decorate the gravestones and share a meal,” says Farris, who grew up in Irving as the fifth of seven children. “We couldn’t wait to get to dessert.”
They call it “Homecoming,” and Farris attended her first in 1956 as a babe in arms. It was no small affair: A formal portrait photograph of the event is nearly 2 feet long and depicts some 130 neatly dressed men, women and children seated and standing in precise rows.
Fast-forward nearly seven decades and Farris, who now lives in Dallas and works in information systems as a senior business analyst, can be found volunteering at least once a week in an old cemetery. She trims bushes, pulls weeds, and performs the skilled work of repairing broken gravestones and righting those that are leaning.
“People think you don’t need to go there until you die, but cemeteries age,” Farris says. “A tree could fall. The earth moves, and the stones tip over. Volunteers are so important because you can’t necessarily pay somebody to keep it up forever.”
Farris also leads cemetery tours for the Dallas County Pioneer Association (DCPA), including a Sept. 16 pilgrimage to four old Irving graveyards, and she is a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, whose mission is to study and preserve gravestones. She enjoys researching and reporting on the sometimes incredible stories of those underneath the oldest tombstones.
“One guy walked away from his family and changed his identity and had a whole second family,” Farris says. “He named the kids in the second family the same names as the kids in the first.”
That fellow is buried at Sowers Cemetery in Irving, the graveyard that lured Farris into her unusual hobby. Both her parents are buried at Sowers (which is pronounced “sours”). In 2016, the cemetery needed fence repair and help with fundraising. She joined the board of the Sowers Cemetery Association, and her brother, former Irving city councilman Gerald Farris, signed on as president.
After they got the fence replaced, the board wanted to host a barbecue and tour as a fundraiser. Farris began researching Sowers’ oldest graves, which date as far back as 1865. She found that the headstones were dirty, and some markers for city founders were rickety and falling over. “I thought, Well, wait a minute,” she says. “Surely there’s a way to fix them.”
Farris enjoys hands-on hobbies, and she enlisted Gerald to join her on a trip to Oklahoma for a two-day seminar about tombstone restoration. Presenter Jonathan Appell of Gravestone Conservation in Connecticut leads such workshops nationwide. “It was really amazing,” Farris says.
“He teaches the way to lift a stone properly and shows the whole gamut of different products you can use to repair a break on-site. You can match the color and carve it to make it look like the original.”
Using what he’d learned from Appell, Gerald — who works as a product hazard specialist — built a wooden tripod with a winch and pulley to hoist leaning and fallen headstones, which can weigh several hundred pounds. That was in 2019, and Betsy Farris has continued to attend Appell’s annual regional seminar every year since.
As a member of the DCPA’s cemetery committee and with permission from the graveyards, she has also worked on Oakland Cemetery near Fair Park and Western Heights Cemetery and Glover Cemetery, both in South Dallas. “It may not be your family, but you feel like you’re doing something for somebody,” she says.
Groups that manage old cemeteries have had to get creative to generate interest, recruit volunteers and raise money. Some stage movie nights or bring-your-dog-to-the-cemetery night, Farris points out. Sowers Cemetery Association runs a website and Facebook page and hosts an annual barbecue called Appreciation Day. It promotes the autumn fundraiser via an on-site box of flyers.
“A lot of the time it’s not obvious how to donate or that a cemetery needs help,” she says. “But they are all in the same boat. You have to generate money somehow for perpetual care.”
Preserving the past
Helping to maintain historic graveyards — and sometimes simply finding them — is one of the missions of the Dallas County Pioneer Association (DCPA), a nonprofit dedicated to researching and preserving the area’s earliest history.
The county has at least 40 graveyards that date to the 19th century, according to DCPA cemetery coordinator Kathy Ann Reid. “Some pioneer cemeteries are well cared for, and some are neglected and abandoned,” Reid says. “Some still are not really noticed.”
She is always looking for people to join her small committee of mostly seniors, whose work ranges from cleaning and repairing gravestones to researching who deeded an unnamed burial ground. “We try to bring attention to cemeteries because they are easy to forget about, even by the people who know about them,” Reid says.
She tries to interest neighborhood associations in maintaining old cemeteries as green spaces because neglected plots can become unsightly dumping grounds, and some have been vandalized. A descendant of Dallas founder John Neely Bryan’s sister-in-law, Reid has seen all kinds of unfortunate situations.
“In years past, there has been development over cemeteries, people removing tombstones and pretending no one is under the ground,” she says. “I don’t think it will be happening so much today, although I have seen it on private land. We tried really hard to deter an owner from getting rid of all the tombstones, and we couldn’t get them to desist.”
She also recalls helping to hunt for the 19th-century Durrett family graveyard on rural property near a Lancaster area that was slated for development. The new landowner, who hadn’t a clue about the three graves, wanted them removed, so the title company paid to have them disinterred and reinterred, she reports.
“It’s amazing to me that there was a cemetery out there, and nobody knew where it was until they tracked it down,” Reid says. “We did find some wood and bones.”
Gerald Farris, who volunteers at Sowers Cemetery in Irving, says the experience is rewarding. “If you go out there for a few hours, it has that therapeutic release that you would get from fishing or playing a round of golf,” he says. “It’s also fascinating to watch throughout the year — all the different grasses and wildflowers and the 100-year-old oak trees. We stake an interesting plant so the mower won’t mow it over. We look at how to make it attractive as a natural destination to enjoy plants.”
Reid has similar goals. “This is fulfilling in that it helps neighborhoods where the cemeteries are and it preserves the past,” she says. “It can be a park while honoring the graves that are there.”
For information, visit DallasPioneer.org.