This week may be short and sweet because my granddaughter, Erzsébet, is running rampant in my office. I guess I should have nicknamed her Erwin, as in Erwin Rommel, instead of Erzsébet, because the blitzkrieg is strong with this two-and-a-half-year-old. I will also admit that her sword skills (with a plastic knife) have improved thanks to her father (a marine) and that her banzai charges have also gotten better (thanks to me) since her last visit—but I digress!

Yesterday, a few of us at the Jefferson County Historical Commission (JCHC) started a project that was a long time in the making. Before I get into our plans, I will tell you a little bit of the history of what I will call the Lincoln Rest Cemetery Project.

Back in 2012, when I joined the JCHC, I learned of an abandoned cemetery on Labelle Road. The then cemetery chair said in a meeting that she tried to enter the grounds, but the trees and the underbrush were too thick to penetrate. So here I go, a couple of weeks later, armed with a line trimmer, a hedge trimmer, and loppers. It took me two hours to make it to the first crypt, but it was the beginning of a twelve-year (and counting) journey. That day, I discovered that some of the crypts were broken. I found out later that a group of teenagers from Beaumont vandalized this cemetery in 1967. This was the first detail I learned of the cemetery, but why did it become abandoned?

Initially, we called this the Broussard Cemetery, but after doing some research, we realized that it was the Lincoln Rest Cemetery, a burial site for low-income people used between 1930 and 1950. It has been abandoned ever since. The county did a cleanup a few times through the years, but there is no overseer of this hallowed ground. The last cleanup was in 2015, and they did a great job clearing three acres of what is an eleven-acre cemetery. At the time, the public was watching. They saw a crew working in an old cemetery and blue tarps put down over the damaged and broken crypts. So, some of you called KBMT News, saying that there were people removing bodies. They weren’t, but KBMT came out and discovered the rub of the situation.

One great thing from this episode was that a man named Cleveland Dyer, a World War II navy veteran, saw the KBMT News broadcast and contacted the program because his dad was buried in the cemetery. He was ninety-seven years old at the time and had been trying to clean around his father’s crypt through the years. In 2015, he visited the cleared cemetery, pointed out his father’s crypt, and made sure we knew about it.

One problem we’ve had with identifying the crypts and graves is that we have a map of the cemetery but no names, and since this is an abandoned burial ground with no headstones, we have no information on its residents. We found one headstone in the three acres that were cleared, and it belonged to Uncle Ed Jones, who died in 1930. I would assume that one of the workers laid the stone on Mr. Dyer’s crypt during the cleanup, and yes, we thought that was where Mr. Jones was buried, but thanks to Cleveland Dyer, we now know that this is not the case. Also, we found the base of a headstone that is the perfect size for Mr. Jones’s tombstone, so that was also a win.

Since the 2015 cleanup, we’ve had floods, COVID-19, and many other issues that have meant this cemetery hasn’t been cared for as it should, but there is hope. A few individuals seem to want this hallowed ground cared for. Cleveland Dyer passed in 2018, and I have the recording of the oral-history interview we did with him the day he set foot in the cleared cemetery where his father is interred. When you hear his voice, you can feel his determination to keep his father’s resting place tidy.

We began cleaning the cemetery on Saturday; we mowed the trails to the crypts and got rid of some of the brush around them. We are not done—by any means—but it’s baby steps in a major project. If you would like to get involved and volunteer on this project, email me at rediscovingsetx@gmail.com

We will prevail!