|
Greenwood
Greenwood Cemetery
130 Stoner Avenue
The New
City Cemetery, as it was known from its beginning, began
as a ten-acre tract at the corner of Market Street and
Stoner Avenue. Formerly the sight had been part of the
Stoner Plantation, but even further back in its history,
the land held a Civil War military hospital as well as
the first charity hospital. The name changed in 1905,
and the site has grown to over seventy-acres.1
The
cemetery features burial sections for Greeks, Jews,
blacks, union members, veterans, masons, and a specific
section for Confederate veterans. The Confederate
section is the site of Battery 4, one of the twelve that
was located in the area during the Civil War.
2
At least one Civil War casualty is buried here. Richard
McDonald was killed at the Battle of Norfolk and moved
to Greenwood. Three graves in the Confederate veterans
section mark the oldest surviving veterans; William
Townsend, who died in 1953 at the age of 107, was one of
the six surviving Civil War veterans of the world.
3
A single cross stands in the center of Pauper’s Field,
the section for those given free burial. No markers
stand here, as those interred are buried with only the
numbered graves.
4
Another section bears a tombstone inscribed “LSUMC” for
the ashes of people who donated their bodies to science.
5
The
cemetery, which was dedicated in 1892, bears the graves
of four Shreveport mayors: Jerome B. Gilmore,
Andrew
Currie, Samuel A. Dickinson, and John McWilliams Ford.
Historian J. Fair Hardin’s and philanthropist R. W.
Norton’s graves are also found here, as is the grave of
the founder of what is today Christus Schumpert Medical
Center, Dr. Thomas Edgar Schumpert, who died of
typhoid. Bush Jarratt, who was the city’s last official
hangman, and
Ben White, Shreveport’s last steamboat
captain, along with businessman
W. K. Henderson, Sr. and
his son,
W. K. Henderson, Jr., who served as owner and
announcer of KWKH radio station, are buried here.
6
Milton
Taylor Hancock’s tomb is one of the most notable – and
oldest – in the cemetery. People remember Hancock as
the inventor of the first modern disc plow in the early
1890s. Senator Thomas C. Garret, later lieutenant
governor of Louisiana, helped Hancock patent his device,
and when Hancock Plow Company was chartered in
Shreveport in 1893, Hancock was on his way to being one
of Shreveport’s first millionaires. By 1900 the plow was
the largest selling plow on the American Market, and
factories were set up in Illinois, Georgia, Missouri,
California, Texas, Missouri, and Tennessee; a factory
was established in New Orleans, but never in
Shreveport. But his invention is not the only reason he
is remembered. In 1892 Hancock and his wife, Nina, saw
the death of their four-year-old daughter, Ethyl. She
was buried in a cast-iron coffin that was placed in the
tomb. Inside the tomb was a chair, which Nina would sit
in each evening when she visited Ethyl and read her
bedtime stories. In 1903 they lost their 24-year-old
daughter, Irene, who is also buried in the vault. The
Hancocks moved to Los Angeles, California with their
son, Milton Hancock, Jr., who was their only surviving
child. On June 29, 1905 sixteen-year-old Milton, Jr. was
serving as chauffer for his father in their automobile,
which was still a new invention. A dairy wagon that ran
in front of the car was struck and Hancock was thrown
from the car window and dragged 125 feet to his death in
one of the first automobile wrecks in the country. He
was buried in the vault with his two daughters; his wife
and son never moved back to Shreveport.
7
In 1996
members of the Susan Constant Chapter of the Colonial
Dames XVII Century dedicated a plaque honoring the
cemetery.
8
References
Back to Top
|
