I’ve spent several hours over the last few days walking around La Réunion Cemetery in West Dallas, which, by all rights, should have been impossible. Since 1961, this landmarked land — all that remains of the colony founded 170 years ago by democratic-socialist Europeans hoping to plant Utopia in Texas — has been surrounded by a chain-link fence, whose two official entrances are chained and padlocked. A visit here should be by appointment-only, with a call to Dallas City Hall.
But for the last several months, at least, there’s been a gaping hole in the chain link. It appears a car plowed through a corner of the fence line and landed in the historic cemetery in which many of the French, Belgian and Swiss colonists who sojourned to Dallas in the mid-1850s are buried, among them Reverchon Park’s namesake, Julien Reverchon, and the infant daughter of François Jean Cantagrel, La Réunion’s first director. Later followed Mexican laborers who worked in the cement factories, footnotes deserving their own history books.
I saw the bent poles and ripped-away chain-link fence last week, when a wrong turn landed me on the shores of Fish Trap Lake in the shadow of the cement plants that once rendered this stretch of West Dallas a Superfund site.
One wrong turn in West Dallas last week led me to the months-old hole in the chain-link fence surrounding La Réunion Cemetery.(Robert Wilonsky)
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“Man, I don’t know how long it’s been like that,” said the man walking past when I asked about the battered chain-link sinking into the tall weeds. “Since as long as I can remember.” His name is Angel, and he said he lives in the Dallas Housing Authority’s assisted living facility behind the cemetery. He thought people who died in his building were buried here. Google Maps’ wayback machine shows the chain-link has been down since at least January.
This tucked-away corner of West Dallas, off Singleton Boulevard and North Hampton Road, has seen better days. The pavilion along the lake, built by Dallas’ Park and Recreation Department but now under the auspices of the DHA, has been vandalized with epithets spray-painted in lime green. It appears people are camping beneath its cover, sleeping there with all their worldly possessions. There are large holes in the flimsy pier from which kids on Monday were pulling heavy catfish out of Fish Trap Lake, which lifers know as one of the city’s most contaminated bodies of water.
La Réunion Cemetery sits just above the lake, tucked among DHA-owned homes and senior-living facilities, including the sprawling Village at Lakewest. The muddy ground next to the cemetery is still covered in the remnants of what I imagine was an impressive fireworks display on July 4. On Monday, a city marshal was driving through the mud in search of a dead dog about which he’d received a call.
John Jenkins, the director of Dallas’ Park and Recreation Department, didn’t know anything about the damaged fence when I called to ask about it last week. Since the 1970s, La Réunion has been among the 11 disused cemeteries under Park and Recreation’s care, along with the paupers cemetery off Walnut Hill Lane in northwest Dallas.
It appears a dead tree branch took down the gravestone of Adelaide Florence Henry, a French-born colonist who died at 41 in August 1858.(Robert Wilonsky)
The city has spent $17,274 since 2020 to cut La Réunion’s grass and pile up the dead tree limbs like the ones that appear to have knocked over the gravestone of Adelaide Florence Henry, a French-born colonist who died at 41 in August 1858. That price tag doesn’t include repairing or replacing headstones, which, according to the city, is “the responsibility of a decedent’s family or estate,” of which there aren’t many left.
On Monday I tracked down Julien Reverchon’s 81-year-old great-nephew, Julien Caillet, a retired anesthesiologist in Arizona whose grandfather has an elementary school named for him in northwest Dallas. Caillet said he’s never been to the cemetery to see the man for whom he’s named. “And I’m kind of embarrassed about that,” he said.
Jenkins, who met me at the cemetery Monday evening, discovered earlier in the day that the torn-open gate has been on the city’s to-do list for at least two months, but it was low on the list of priorities. He said he would be sending crews to fix the fence this week, “because it’s our duty to preserve these graves.” By Tuesday afternoon, repairs were already underway.
He pointed to the spray-painted pavilion and said he was concerned about vandals bringing their cans into the cemetery, which received its Texas Historical Commission marker in 1974.
Margaret Henry was actually born in Scotland, and was the wife of one of the French-born La Réunion settlers. She was 63 when she died in 1887, and hers is the only grave in the cemetery surrounded by an iron fence. Her gravestone wasn’t broken the last time it was photographed, for Find a Grave, in 2010.(Robert Wilonsky)
“Where they become disheartening for us is we don’t have the funding,” he said. “When someone vandalizes the tombstones, or when they break, we can’t replace them. But we understand and appreciate their importance, the history. I love coming to these old cemeteries and spending time out here.”
Jenkins had never been to La Réunion until Monday. The first thing he noticed was the absence of gravestones, most of which he thinks have been swallowed by the soft ground here. Find a Grave records there are 224 people buried at La Réunion Cemetery, but only a few dozen markers are plainly visible, several of them belonging to the Mexican immigrants who toiled in the Cement City plants that built Dallas, like Meliton Medina, who died in 1926 at 38.
Here, too, is Bonnie Parker’s kin, including her grandparents, Frank and Mary Jane Krause, and uncle Samuel, who was killed in Germany during World War I.
Meliton Medina’s gravestone is the only one in the cemetery that says “Cement City.” He was among the Mexican immigrants who came to Dallas to work in the cement plants that would come to define and defile West Dallas.(Robert Wilonsky)
Somewhere in this soft ground is Jean Baptiste “Pere” Lagogue, who, according to old newspaper stories, was one of Napoleon’s soldiers and is said to have been the first La Réunion colonist buried here. Here, too, is Francois Santerre, whose extensive book collection now belongs to the Dallas Historical Society.
Perhaps the nicest gravestone in the cemetery belongs to Julien Reverchon, who arrived from France when he was 18, became a revered botanist and, eventually, the namesake for one of the park department’s crown jewels. Julien’s wife, Marie, is also buried here, along with their sons, Michel and Maximilien, who succumbed to typhoid fever in 1884.
Jenkins spent a long time in the cemetery, searching for buried headstones. He found one in some tall grass bearing a crudely carved poem, which begins: “A loved one gone from us so dear/A voice still we loved to hear.” We walked out through the hole in the fence, which is on track to be repaired by week’s end.
“This should have been a top priority,” he said. “It’s our job to protect these people.”