The Morning Blend
Welcome
Complete Media Kit
Herald/Review
BISBEE — The city of Bisbee’s Evergreen Cemetery came to life Sunday afternoon when hundreds of public officials and citizens gathered for a ceremony dedicating a stone monument bearing plaques proclaiming the cemetery’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
As part of the ceremony, Bisbee students dressed in period costumes representing some of the 15,000 people buried there and delivered short talks at their grave sites.
Cody Frosco, 13, a student at Lowell Junior High School, across Old Douglas Road from the cemetery, took on the persona of Bisbee pioneer George Warren, for whom the city’s Warren district is named.
|
|
Standing next to a huge white monument at Warren’s grave, Frosco told a small audience the story of how Warren had bet all his stock in the Copper Queen Mine on a race horse — and lost.
“Some questioned my lifestyle, because I was a drinker,” Frosco said. Attired in prospector’s garb, Frosco added, “I died as a pauper.”
A short distance away, Marco Ballestaros and Kimberly Munsey posed as Joseph and Catherine Muirhead. Joseph came to Bisbee as a miner in 1900 but eventually built the Castle Rock Hotel, which is now a bed and breakfast inn. He became Bisbee’s first mayor, Ballestaros said. Catherine was the first president of the Bisbee Women’s Club, Munsey told the audience.
Other students spread around the cemetery, educating small groups of people with other stories about those buried at Evergreen since its opening in 1912.
The 14 students were organized by Snoody Borowiec. Borowiec and Luche Giacomino made the costumes.
The original city cemetery in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch had to be closed because it was contaminating well water, resulting in a series of typhoid outbreaks, according to the monument’s plaque. City Park was developed over the old cemetery site.
The old graves were moved to the 40-acre Evergreen Cemetery in 1914.
Assistant City Manager John Charley was master of ceremonies for the event, telling the audience filling two sets of bleachers and gathered around, “It’s hard not to be touched, mentally and spiritually,” by the historic cemetery.
Charley and Bisbee Community Development Director Donna Harris traced the history of efforts to get the cemetery designated as a national historic site, beginning in 1998 when the first cemetery committee was formed.
The city of Bisbee wrote a grant application in 2002, hoping to have the cemetery placed on the National Register. University of Arizona architecture students and their instructor, R. Brooks Jeffery, wrote the 40-page nomination as a project during the spring of 2003. The grant was awarded to the city that year.
Jeffery is coordinator for preservation studies and associate dean of the university’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
The nomination then went through the Historical Site Review Committee in July 2004 and was approved with a few modifications. The National Parks Service Keeper of the National Register rejected the designation, however, causing a reapplication which was submitted this past August. It finally was accepted on Oct. 7.
Evergreen Cemetery is just one of two cemeteries in the state that have been placed on the National Register, Harris said.
Harris read a letter from Brooks, who was unable to attend the ceremony, describing Evergreen as “a snapshot of a Bisbee that no longer exists,” because of its diversity.
Although the cemetery is divided into numerous sections for religious, social and fraternal groups, Jeffery wrote: “Evergreen Cemetery was a landscape of inclusion and even democracy, representing the ultimate equality of death.”
The cemetery project involved many members of the Bisbee community, including Margaret Hartnett, who spearheaded creation of a computer database listing of most grave sites. Hartnett told the audience that three sources were used to compile the database, but the results are not etched in stone. She’s already heard of some mistakes that had to be corrected. Plus, the cemetery has “huge sections of unmarked graves” that the Cemetery Committee wants to see marked.
In unveiling the historic site marker with Charley, Nancy Davies of the Cemetery Committee hinted at much more work to be done at the location.,
“We really plan to put Evergreen Cemetery on the map,” Davies said.
Herald/Review reporter Michael Sullivan can be reached at 515-4682 or by e-mail at michael.sullivan@svherald.com.
TheSilverRose wrote on Jun 27, 2009 10:22 PM:
Thank You! "