Sunday Cemetery - Vandals at Greenwood Cemetery

Published August 1978 in the Dallas Mom…News out of  Dallas, TX
Found while searching Genealogybank.com

Vandals hit 104-year-old city cemetery twice in week

By STEVE KENNY

Vandals caused an estimated $60,000 damage in two incidents this week at the 104-year-old Greenwood Cemetery, the second oldest in the city and the burial place for some Dallas County pioneers, police said.

The vandals, who struck Wednesday and Thursday nights, overturned 83 headstones at the cemetery, 3020 Oak Grove Ave., officers said.

POLICE SAID cemetery officials did not report the first incidence of vandalism on Wednesday night, when 10 tombstones where overturned and three were broken, because they feared news accounts could result in more vandalism. The cemetery gates were not locked when the Wednesday night incident occurred, police said.

Vandals struck again Thursday night, police, said, despite locked gates and a German shepherd guard dog which was left loose to patrol the grounds. Officers said the vandals apparently scaled a 10-foot wrought iron fence near the gatehouse on Oak Grove Avenue, then overturned tombstones along a path leading toward the cemetery’s McKinney Avenue boundary

A total 73 tombstones were damaged in Thursday night’s incident, police said, with “several” of the stones broken into several pieces.

CEMETERY OFFICALS said 39 tombstones received major damage and 44 received minor damage. However, cemetery grounds manager Raymond Bouksa refused to say if any of the damaged tombstones were irreplaceable or to specify which stones are damaged.

Police said Bouksa gave them a damage estimate of $60,000.

The cemetery – bounded by Hall Street, Clyde Lane, McKinney Avenue and Oak Grove Avenue – is the burial place for ancestors of many famous Dallas families including Akards, Fields, Bryans, Rosses, Lemmons and Cockrells.

Greenwood was the second Dallas cemetery when it was opened in 1874 by W.H. Gaston. The first bodies were buried there in 1875.