News

Jul 09, 2023

Grant helps restore Brownsville’s Old City Cemetery

BROWNSVILLE — A restoration project at the Old City Cemetery is moving forward,

BROWNSVILLE — A restoration project at the Old City Cemetery is moving forward, thanks to a grant from the South Texas Center for Historical & Genealogical Research.

Eugene Fernandez, the center's director and a champion for the cemetery's restoration, outlined the project and grant in a presentation to the Brownsville City Commission a year ago on May 19, 2022.

At that time, Fernandez's 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation awarded two grants of $1,000 each to the City of Brownsville Parks & Recreation Department. The first funded building a Montezuma Cypress nursery at La Posada Park in Southmost. The second launched a project to repair the broken funerary monuments in Old City Cemetery.

Fernandez said the Montezuma Cypres nursery project was complected last month and now has 600 healthy Montezuma Cypress seedlings two feet high in a nursery greenhouse. The final expenditure in material and labor was closer to $7,000, given to the parks system, he said.

"This new project … involves the actual repair, re-stabilizing of foundations, and cleaning of tombstones within the cemetery. Over the years, there were many acts of vandalism inflicted upon this 171-year-old burial ground," Fernandez stated in a commentary about the projects.

From the 1970s through the 1990s the cemetery saw what appeared to be the worst damage, inflicted by the Parra Gang and other groups, he said.

At the first City Commission meeting of 2003, Fernandez appeared before commissioners and then-Mayor Eddie Trevino to launch a plan that was called "Save Our Cemetery Association."

It called for greater attention to the protection, repair and maintenance of the cemetery.

As a direct result, a grant was obtained to replace the old pea gravel carriage path with a very attractive route that was covered in brick pavers, Fernandez stated.

"Beyond this, the area security lighting was enhanced and six security cameras were installed Brownsville police officers were instructed to perform frequent drive-throughs of the cemetery as well. The suggestion was made in the initial project outline that the cemetery be inducted into the city parks system and be maintained by Greens Division thereafter," Fernandez said.

"This movement greatly reduced the presence of vagrants and also the vandalism was decreased to an appreciable degree," he said.

The present repair project identified 48 priority monuments that would receive attention on various levels. Generally speaking, the majority of the damage that was done to the tombstones was classified as breakages of the marble "tablets," caused by malicious toppling by the vandals.

The tombstone bases have been set vertically since the 2003 start date, but the broken shards of marble remained alongside until now. Logistically, the smaller pieces of broken tablature will be cleaned on their joining surfaces and a very special epoxy will be applied, and these monuments will be reconstructed back to their original form, Fernandez said.

"The larger stones will be carefully lifted, utilizing scaffolding and chain hoist mechanisms with nylon rope tethers to allow for the re-joining of the sections. If bases are in need of being brought to level, this operation will be performed as well. Any fissures along the break lines will be filled with a special white marble dust and epoxy mixture. The last function will be the spraying of the stones with a special patented anti-mold and stain removal solution," Fernandez stated.

Once the initial four-dozen monuments are repaired, additional lots will be added to the project list in hopes of bringing this historic cemetery back to a semblance of its former glory. The overall timetable for the project should take (easily) four months and shall be performed at no cost to the city or the plot/compound owners. The work will be done in a manner that should leave little or no criticism as pertains to job quality, and the materials used will guarantee that the repairs will be permanent, he said.

Fernandez also said the South Texas Center for Historical & Genealogical Research would like to fund the procurement and placement of ceramic numeral sets to be laid along curb sides to mark the positions of the perpendicular "blocks" of the burial rows.