“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.
Opinion
All that remains of the marker for Homer Milton C. Burns in the Dallas City Cemetery
Robert Wilonsky
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.
As Daniel Babb notes, if you aren’t paying attention you would never know that there are 2,080 people buried beneath these three acres along a stretch of warehouses and offices in Northwest Dallas.
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.
There are but a handful of modern-day grave markers at the Dallas City Cemetery, and this is the most recent. Daniel Babb was part of the ceremony for Mary Isabel Black, who was buried here shortly after the cemetery opened in 1932.
Robert Wilonsky
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, Daniel Babb found a marker missing the tin that identifies who was buried here. That’s not unusual, though, given the passage of time and lawnmowers since the cemetery stopped accepting the dead in 1978.
Robert Wilonsky
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.”