Van Buren cemetery restoration work to air on AETN

story and photos by Marla Cantrell
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Randy Smith stepped out of his white pickup, took a final drag on his cigarette, and looked out across the 10 acres that make up Van Buren’s Fairview Cemetery.

“This is one of my favorite places on Earth,” Smith said.

The 54-year-old conservationist is helping preserve the cemetery, the oldest public burial site in Crawford County. His work will be featured in an AETN documentary in 2010.  The date is to be announced.

But the show is just a result of Smith’s work. The real focus is the cemetery, founded in 1846, that sits just north of the Van Buren Depot off Poplar Street. And he was more than happy to talk about it.

“The rest of the cemetery is aligned east and west. But these graves are all facing south,” Smith said, pointing to the graves of Confederate soldier, where the 442 headstones are lined up in perfect diagonal rows. “It’s kind of a symbolic ‘up yours’ to the North.  … The stones are all pointed at the top so no one from the Union Army could ever sit on top of them.”

From theses graves you can see the Wallace Children’s Monument. It is surrounded by the headstones of the Wallace and Ward families. Alfred Wallace and A.J. Ward married sisters, grew their fortunes, and finally were buried together. Smith touched the statue, the black sleeve of his coat a stark contrast against the Georgian marble. It is this monument that started Smith on his preservation journey.

“After the cemetery went on the National Registry in 2005, a huge tree branch fell and broke it into a couple of dozen pieces,” Smith said. “This cherub weighs over 350 pounds. … The eye of God is carved here,” he said, pointing to the spot where the eye looks straight ahead. “It symbolized God watching over all children.”

Smith believes Alfred and Martha Wallace intended for the monument, dedicated to their three young daughters, to last forever.

“I literally woke up one morning at 3:30 worrying about that monument. I knew I was supposed to make sure it was restored,” Smith said.

Smith wrote a grant proposal asking the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program to help fund the repair of the statue, which rises more than 13 feet above the ground. It was turned down in 2006, but he revamped his request in 2007 and hit pay dirt. Today, the 170-year-old monument looks much as it did when it was erected.

Smith, who is the manager of Edwards Van-Alma Funeral Home, was hooked. He began researching Ward and Wallace families, using much of the information he found in Clara Eno’s book, “The History of Crawford County.”

“Most likely these stones were cut and constructed in pieces in Philadelphia,” Smith said. “Very likely the marble was quarried, cut and carved, brought down the river on steam boat and erected by slaves. Arkansas was a slave holding state and both Wallace and Ward held slaves.”

A few steps away, a young girl’s grave tells another story of slavery. Emily, a slave, was only 14 when she died. Her simple stone reads, “Our faithful little nurse Emily.”

“It was common knowledge that Judge Jesse Turner was against Arkansas succeeding from the Union,” Smith said. “He was very outspoken about that. She died in 1864.  Think about that. In 1864, at the height of the Civil War, Van Buren was already occupied and a prominent white family buries a slave on their plot. I just thought … it’s a real statement on their part. The cemetery was largely segregated at that point. It said a whole lot about what he thought about equality.”

Turner’s family plot is a stone’s throw away from John Drennen, the co-founder of Van Buren, who came to the area in 1831. Drennen, whose home is being restored with significant support from the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, as an historic site, had a prestigious career as a lawmaker, postmaster and Captain of the Arkansas Frontier Guard. He also donated the land for Fairview.

But the greatest lure of the cemetery isn’t the Victorian sculpture, the graves of great men, or the monuments to unfortunate children. More people come to Fairview to see the mystery grave, the final resting place of one of DeSoto’s men, or two of LaSalle’s, or maybe a Viking. No one really knows. And Smith wants to keep it that way.

“There was a historian in town who wanted to prove it,” Smith said. “He wanted to have him disinterred. I told him he had to have permission from next of kin in Arkansas. He said he would find a way around it. I said, ’I don’t think you will.’ I’ll go before a judge and have you stopped. … This grave has lent itself to the local lore of the city of Van Buren for well of over 100 years. The grave is likely three or four-hundred years old. So the lure and the attraction is that nobody does know for sure. Why would you want to prove it and take the mystery away?”

Why indeed.

The mystery and history of this place continue to draw in crowds.

Beginning in 2006, UAFS students have worked with Smith on Tales of the Crypt, a fundraiser that features actors portraying some of the people buried at Fairview. The money helps restore deteriorating or broken monuments. This year, the event raised $1,000.

Since Smith started his mission, seven monuments have been restored. Volunteers, including employees from Edwards Van-Alma Funeral Home, are adopting stones to clean and preserve. He credits his boss, Jim Edwards, for his assistance in the projects. 

The cleaning process is not hard to do. Smith said it only takes a little elbow grease, and a product called D-2 Architectural Cleaner, which is made by a company in Andover, Md.

“It’s very environmentally friendly,” Smith said. “It remains active for 18 months. Every time it rains or there’s a heavy dew it reactivates to leach contaminants out of the stone.  Two things happen. It whitens and the natural PH of the monument restores itself and it becomes harder over time. It will extend lifespan indefinitely.”

As for today’s headstones, Smith said they’re mostly made from granite and should stand the test of time. Families should scrape the moss and lichen from them every year or two and then rinse the stone with water.

But there’s at least one headstone at Fairview that gets a lot more attention than that.

“I clean my mother’s monument every six months,” Smith said.

Smith, who won a state award for preservation in January, stopped on his way back to his pickup. He stood near an ornate iron fence surrounding a cluster of restored monuments.

A man in coveralls slammed the driver’s door on an old yellow van across the street. He revved its motor, sending a wall of white smoke into the air. Smith didn’t seem to notice. He took off his sunglasses and looked across the hallowed ground.

“It’s like a piece of time frozen,” Smith said. “That’s what makes the cemetery, as a landscape, so valuable. Time stands still on this place.”