Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
North Little Rock cemetery preservation may be forthcoming
A small, long-neglected cemetery dating to 1880 in North Little Rock’s Levy area is about to undergo a preservation effort by the city, according to a proposal headed to the North Little Rock City Council today.
A resolution proposes to authorize eminent domain proceedings on Thomas Cemetery, a 2-acre property hidden away off Division Street next to the 60-acre Edgewood Cemetery. The action would allow the city to “provide ground maintenance and upkeep” of the property.
“We’re simply trying to establish ownership and, if not, we will do eminent domain simply because we can then protect it,” city spokesman Nathan Hamilton said. “This is all in an effort to protect it.”
North Little Rock History Commission efforts to locate a title holder to the cemetery have been unsuccessful, so it is considered private property, limiting the amount of true restoration work that can be done there, History Commission Executive Director Sandra Taylor-Smith said.
The city’s eminent domain action will fulfill the requirement for property rights to better maintain the cemetery if no owner can be found, according to the resolution.
The cemetery’s condition first came to the City Council’s attention two years ago when a senior-level Arkansas history class from the University of Central Arkansas researched the cemetery’s history as a semester project and presented its findings to the council.
Kristal Clark, a North Little Rock History Commission member and grounds supervisor at the Edgewood Cemetery, aided UCA’s research and has led community efforts to restore and preserve Thomas Cemetery, researching the names and stories behind those who are buried there.
“Kristal has gotten the city to mow it and tend to it, and she is constantly finding new headstones and burials there to research,” Taylor-Smith said.
Initial research and Clark’s personal efforts from two years ago found that Thomas Cemetery’s approximately 600 graves are mainly those of working-class residents and children who died from malaria or typhoid fever from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
There are also about three dozen Civil War veterans and a number of victims of murders and suicides, Thomas has said, from a period when North Little Rock was known as Argenta and held a reputation as a rough railroad town.
In May 2016, UCA assistant history professor Story Matkin-Rawn, who taught the history course that took on Thomas Cemetery as a project, said in an interview that she considered the cemetery “an extremely valuable property” to North Little Rock’s early history, because it provided evidence of “how everyday people lived their lives.”
Founders of the cemetery, according to local history, allowed for free burials, mostly for children, causing Thomas Cemetery to be mistakenly labeled as a “pauper’s graveyard.” Clark has said that reputation may have led to it being neglected in later years.
The City Council meeting is at 6 p.m. today. It wasn’t held Monday as usual because of the Memorial Day holiday.