The Cemetery That Will Not Die

For decades, the tiny 139-year-old family cemetery located in a White Rock Lake neighborhood has gone largely unnoticed, even by area residents who haven’t seemed disturbed by the frequent vandalism there or the briar-infested thicket that has grown over some 200 scarcely visible grave sites. However, all that changed last spring when the neighborhood pulled together to protest the construction of new housing on the cemetery tract, located at the corner of San Leandro and St. Francis. Despite several months of verbal jousting, building has begun. Now the neighborhood kids call Ferris Cemetery “Poltergeist Haven.”

“Nobody could understand why anyone would want to live on top of bodies,” says Rita Barnes, a history buff who has become a self-styled leader of the fight to block the new residences. “What’s happened to this cemetery has come to represent all that’s bad in our society-the greed, the disregard for anything but money. We’re trying to show that you can’t always do this in Dallas. I know the property is valuable, but still, the new property owners bought it knowing full well what it was. They bought a cemetery.”

Bill Dickson, a Dallas architect who owns one of the six lots on the cemetery tract, says most of the property in question had been zoned and platted for residential development since 1924. Dickson, the spokesman for the group of cemetery property owners, says there have been no burials in Ferris Cemetery for the past seventy-five or eighty years and that there has been little or no maintenance of the grave sites since the last interment near the turn of the century. In fact, Dickson says that in 1970 the Dallas City Council passed a resolution declaring the cemetery a public nuisance due to the vandalism and lack of upkeep. Since the neighborhood controversy began last spring, Dickson says three homes have been built on the tract in question and two more are planned in the near future. To ensure that none of the building occurred over any of the grave shafts, Dickson says the property owners hired Jim Bruseth, then director of SMU’s archaeology research program, to search for possible remains or grave shafts. Bruseth won’t discuss his study, but Dickson says all but a few of the graves were located on the 7,500-square-foot common area where no new homes are being constructed.

“We feel our plans are in concert with many of the descendants of those who were buried in the cemetery,” says Dickson. “We’ve agreed not to build on the common ground where nearly all the grave sites were located. We’ve also agreed to the erection of a historical marker on the common lot.”

Barnes, who is sharing her research on Dallas cemeteries with the Dallas County Historical Commission, says she’ll continue to fight for the memory of the people who were buried in the modest cemetery. But other residents like June Shipley, who has lived in the neighborhood for the past twenty-three years, have grown weary of the fight.

“There was a meeting a few weeks ago, but some of us didn’t go,” says Shipley. “We’ve fought in the past for our own personal feelings or against desecration of the dead. But we just don’t want to argue about it anymore.”