Terrebonne backing away from cemetery business

Terrebonne Parish officials are taking a close look at whether they wish to continue running its three public cemeteries, following criticism that the graveyards are ill-maintained.

Parish government took responsibility for maintaining and keeping Halfway in Gray, Bisland in Bourg and Southdown in Houma under varying circumstances over a period of decades. The issues of cemetery preservation and management, referred to the Policy and Procedure Committee following complaints aired at a council meeting earlier this month, have not yet been placed on the committee agenda.

What discussions do occur are likely to be sensitive, and could touch sensitive nerves. All three of the parish cemeteries, local historians agree, are important culturally. They are important as well from the personal standpoint of people related to their occupants. Southdown in particular, however, comes packed with special significance. In addition to the marked graves at that cemetery are an estimated 200-300 burials of people dating back as far as 1828, believed by archeologists to be slaves who once worked on Southdown Plantation, once one of the largest sugarcane operations in Louisiana before its vast lands were parceled out to become sites of subdisivions and business locations. The location of below-ground, unmarked graves, including a trench that might have been used to bury slaves who succumbed to yellow fever, came to light after research and thermal imaging by Earthsearch Inc., a New Orleans firm. That study was requested by Terrebonne Parish prior to construction of a parking lot for the public library in whose shadow the dead of Southdown’s graves now rest.

Council members got an earful of the maintenance and management problems March 13, when Levron Street resident Charles Bass, who has relatives buried in Southdown, delivered a poignant address.

“I’d like to know who knows where new graves will go,” he said. “I have noticed that some headstones were moved, a couple of them from graves of my family. … Maybe we have let too many go in because we have graves on top of graves. Headstones are being removed, trampled over and everything and the next thing you know someone takes a headstone and lays it next to a tree. Some of these people are buried on top of people.”

In the days following that meeting council members have made their views clear.

“I don’t feel the parish should be in the business of maintaining cemeteries,” said Councilman John Navy, noting that he would like to see an overall better handling of cemeteries in general, including those which do not belong to the parish.

Councilman Danny Babin agrees.

“I believe in these things being sacred but we continually hear that the parish does a lousy job,” Babin said. “We continually hear that. Since we evidently aren’t doing a very good job we need to get some process on how we can get rid of these things. I don’t know to who or how we would do it.”

Also addressing the council was Lucretia McBride, the local forensic consultant who served for two years as cemetery administrator about a decade ago. A passionate advocate for cemetery preservation, McBride has since addressed parish officials on cemetery matters, and buttressed Bass’s remarks with her own assessment of problems with the cemeteries, particularly Southdown.

“That’s their option of course,” McBride said of the possibility that the parish might divest itself of burial grounds. “But they are being pressured into the option. There are two things they need to look at, the legal implications and the cultural implications. They need to have communication with their constituents, particularly those who have loved ones in those cemeteries … Parish government needs to come to the realization that there are more state statutes involved in cemetery administration … The existence of old below ground burials needs to be officially recorded.”

The pressure, she said, comes from newer council members like Babin and Navy, who see divesting as being the better course. Their view is not universally shared.

Council member Arlanda Williams said such a solution is one way to go, but that a competent organization willing to do such a take-over would have to be identified.

That could be a long process, she said, adding that in the meantime the parish must not shirk its responsibility of caring for Southdown and other cemeteries in all ways that are appropriate and legal.

“We need to make sure we are maintaining it, keeping it up to date and making sure it is proper and up to order,” Williams said. “I understand those organizations have not stood up yet to say they are going to take over the cemeteries. It’s fine for us to do the research, but in the meantime we need to go out and re-investigate these complaints. Southdown is a historical slave cemetery. If a group wants to step up they can and perhaps we can find grants for the upkeep. I think it is going to be a very difficult to deal with, really. But we are responsible.”

Tomb-maker J. Leonard Scott, who has been the ersatz manager of the cemetery in the years since the cemetery administrator position was created – briefly – and then eliminated, said in an interview last week that it is possible he is laying new tombs above places where bodies have rested for a century and possibly multiple centuries, but that he is doing the best he can with what he has to work with.

“I know not to put nobody in a place where somebody is buried in the ground,” he said. “I put it in rows where they didn’t have nobody. In the old days they would dig 4 to 6 feet. These days we only go 18-20 inches into the ground. There may be one or two people buried in one place. But I thought I was within the cemetery ordinances. I have been following all the rules and bylaws.”

White-washed names on some burial vaults, Scott said, are written temporarily until a family can supply a headstone.

McBride, in communications with parish officials, has noted that laws and rules concerning cemetery management are more complex – and scattered in several places through Louisiana’s statutes and codes – than might at first be realized. Proper records, she has maintained, are not kept. And she echoed some of the allegations relating to broken tombs and misplaced headstones mentioned by Bass.

Broken tombs and misplaced headstones such as those Bass mentioned are indeed a problem, she said, alleging that proper records are not kept and procedures consistent with state cemetery law are not always followed.

Councilman Russell Hornsby suggested that McBride and Bass conference and bring ideas to the Parish Government.

Rachel Cherry, executive director of the Houma-Terrebonne Historical and Cultural Society, headquartered in the Southdown plantation house not far from the cemetery, has done her own share of complaining to the parish.

“With the parish taking care of that cemetery it is not working from a historical perspective, certainly,” she said. “It is being neglected, there are broken stones 100 years old lying on the ground. A family society or a historical society, they are going to take better care of it. I reported on an online forum of the blight, I was appalled by the broken headstones and the fact that they were scattered, nowhere where those graves were anymore, holes and cracks. It is totally disrespectful from the idea and concept of having a cemetery, to identify someone’s loved one in a specific place, in a specific box.”

The age of a cemetery, Cherry noted, can by itself give it historical significance, and the fact that many of Terrebonne’s cemeteries still exist with changing land and battering from floods and hurricanes, is amazing in itself.

As for who might manage Terrebonne’s public cemeteries, Cherry noted that a historical society might do a better job than a for-profit corporation.

“From the historical perspective it doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “So long as it is being taken care of.”

Planning director Pat Gordon said that while he wants to see the cemeteries kept in good repair and free of problems, there is only so much the parish can do.

The parish’s involvement, he said, began in the 1980s, when there was no more space for pauper burials at St. Francis Cemetery No. 2, where the coroner used to lay those to rest who were unclaimed or whose families could not afford burial and funeral arrangements.

“Halfway Cemetery was a defunct cemetery, nobody was maintaining it, so we took over Halfway and started to bury paupers in the rear of that cemetery. A few years later Bisland and Southdown came into play.”

Bisland was donated by a private organization to the parish, Gordon said. Southdown, once maintained by local ministers, also came to be owned by the parish. Those acquisitions were made – reluctantly, according to Gordon – more than a decade ago, when Bobby Bergeron was parish president.

According to Gordon the role the parish plays in managing the cemetery is limited.

“If we are talking about maintenance to vaults and tombs that is not the parish’s responsibility,” Gordon said. “Our ordinance clearly identifies the maintenance is on the family members. We attempt to have a reasonable approach to this, to keep individuals out of the cemetery if they are damaging the tombs. But it is not our responsibility to maintain these tombs and crypts. The responsibility we have is to pick up flowers on the grounds and cut the grass.”

Southdown Cemetery contains marked graves of former plantation workers and their family members as well as an estimated 200-300 enslaved workers who lie in unmarked graves in and around the cemetery proper. 

JOHN DeSANTIS | TRI-PARISH TIMES