Park being added to historic cemetery
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SHREVEPORT — Shreveport’s historic Greenwood Cemetery may soon see an amphitheater, a manmade lake and walking trails with scenic overlooks if the group turning it into a garden cemetery has its way.
The Shreveport Garden Study Club, which oversees the group Friends of Greenwood Cemetery, has kicked off the next part of its ongoing program to preserve and improve the cemetery, which is the final resting place for some of the city’s and region’s more notable public, military and civic leaders.
“Lots of the people who have made this city what it is are buried here,” club spokeswoman Susan Hardtner said. “Now we are about to embark on phase two of turning this into a garden cemetery, a wonderful completeness.”
Hardtner and other club leaders this month unveiled their latest plans for the cemetery, a 72-acre tract on the site of the old Stoner Plantation, and occupying land that once held a Confederate hospital and gun batteries defending the city against Union attacks that never came.
Opened in 1892, it is the last home for several Shreveport mayors, hundreds of military personnel, a former Louisiana governor, internationally famous musicians and painters, millionaires, paupers, scoundrels and philanthropists.
In 1997, the Garden Club entered into a partnership with the city of Shreveport and Shreveport Public Assembly and Recreation, which oversees the city’s parks and cemeteries, to turn Greenwood into a scenic garden, arboretum and tourism draw along the lines of historic Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston.
Over the past decade, in partnership with the city, the club has raised money to build a modern gate house, erect fences and signs, and improve streets, drainage and other physical plant issues.
Club members raised $35,000 to commission a master plan by noted cemetery architect Jon Emerson of Baton Rouge. It also raised $15,000 to prune and feed endangered native trees, started a memorial tree program, presented symposia at the cemetery, instituted educational programs for area eighth-graders, encouraged historical research and created tour maps and brochures highlighting its most-famous residents and sections.
Hardtner said members will vote on pursuing the next phase at the club’s April 7 meeting.
On a recent Thursday, dozens of students from LSU at Shreveport roamed the cemetery, cataloging burial dates for 1,000 markers as part of an ecology project. The same day, garden club planners and Emerson visited the cemetery to begin to develop a project budget for the amphitheater and lake.
These will occupy the “dell” area of the cemetery, ravines and wooded hollows on the north side of the burial ground that have no use for burials.
The amphitheater will use the natural bowl of the four-acre dell to provide a place for services, memorials and other assemblies, with a nearby columbarium that also will have sanitary facilities for visitors.
The lake will be nearby, with water to be piped and held in with a weir and dam, creating a wetland, Hardtner said.
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