There’s a lush lawn within Northeast Baltimore’s Clifton Park Golf Course that now actually looks like it could be the resting place of thousands of Baltimore residents. A few, very few, surviving grave markers and stone monuments remain, but most importantly, the old St. Vincent’s Cemetery contours are now well defined.
It’s taken 15 years in this all-volunteer crusade to bring respect and recognition to these seven acres.
It was not always that way. In 2010, a group of volunteers identified an issue. The tattered remains of a 19th-century cemetery, tucked within what is now a public park, called out for help. Descendants of those interred there were asking questions. Why did the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore allow this to happen?
The group, the Friends of St. Vincent Cemetery, completed their work this spring. The place needs a sign, but when one is installed, the cemetery will still not be easily located, unless you like to play golf.
It’s on a rise overlooking downtown Baltimore near the Belair Road side of the Northeast Baltimore park.
I’ve been visiting the spot now for those 15 years, and it was almost by accident that I found it. I was told to look for the park’s golf course’s maintenance sheds. I wandered around in a tangle of weeds and junk trees and located some granite headstones under a tangle of sumac. While the surrounding golf course was well clipped and groomed, the same was not true of this hidden tract of land. It was a mess. There were heaps of trash abandoned by illegal dumpers.
The restoration effort began in September 2010. The volunteer group, which called themselves the “friends,” allied with St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Parish in downtown Baltimore, the entity that bought the land for a parish cemetery in the 19th century.
The cemetery found its leader, Stephanie Arthur Town, who arranged for her group to get nonprofit status and an early grant from the Parks & People Foundation. Other help came too — reclaiming seven acres left to go wild 50 years ago is not easy.
The last burials were held here in the early 1960s. After St. Vincent’s parish seemed to lose interest in the place, which was not surrounded by a fence and was easily accessible to vandals from the golf course. The cemetery became a place for neighborhood dares, mischief and vandalism.
After someone exhumed a cadaver, there was a public outcry and newspaper stories of the vandalism. The place was abandoned, the funerary markers either knocked down or carted away (some say they were used to stabilize the Herring Run stream bed) and tons of fill dirt added.
The friends group, working with church records, painstakingly identified 3,065 of those buried there. While the graves were thought to be of Baltimore residents of Irish, German and Italian ancestry, some searching revealed there were African-American Roman Catholics interred here. There were military veterans from the Revolutionary War, Civil War (both Union and Confederate) and Spanish-American War.
And while there are only a handful of markers, they tell a good story. One for Nunzio Maranto notes he was born in Cefalu in Sicily, Sept. 15, 1847. The marker for Peter Cummings says he was from County Mayo in Ireland.
(The cemetery is one of several burial places in Northeast Baltimore. Laurel Cemetery, an African American cemetery, has vanished and is now replaced by a shopping center. Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery remains in excellent condition, as does Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, the resting place of Babe Ruth’s mother and Henry Gunther, the last soldier killed in World War I.)
A major obstacle at St. Vincent Cemetery was the invasive growth of junk trees. About 10 years ago, a 15-year-old Dulaney High School sophomore from Lutherville, John Patrick Nolan III, came to the rescue. As his Eagle Scout project, he labored weekends and enlisted help from his friends in Troop 711 — based in Lutherville — his parents and other Scout parents. Noland is now a Maryland State Trooper assigned to a flight paramedic unit.
Once the trees were gone, crews from the adjoining golf course agreed to mow the place.
His father, attorney Terrence “Terry” Nolan, is also a cemetery volunteer who comes three times a week to water recently planted shrubs and groundcovers as they become established.
“There’s a cast of hundreds of people and organizations who quietly put their energy here,” said Terry Nolan. “We now have a respectful burial spot and the knowledge of the histories of the people resting here. It’s a marvelous thing.”
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.
from Baltimore Sun https://ift.tt/jmRSHdO
via IFTTT
