History club works to preserve Pear Orchard Cemetery graves
Lamar University’s History Club has been working with Historic Sacred Spaces to preserve historically Black cemeteries in Beaumont. The group started working on Pear Orchard Cemetery in May.
Jessie Davis, a Beaumont genealogist and preservationist founded Historical Sacred Spaces in March 2022, while looking for her great grandfather’s grave. Davis said all she had to go off was that Lee Prichett was a lumberjack and was possibly buried in Pear Orchard cemetery. Once she found his grave, Davis said she was appalled at the state it was in.
“I do family genealogy a lot,” Davis said. “I was going to the Pear Orchard to look for my great grandfather. While I out there, I was captivated by all the WWI and WWII and Korean veterans that were there and something came over me.
“I called the Jefferson County Historical Commission and that’s when I asked what we can do to honor the veterans that were in all Black cemetery, and I started working on that project and from there I just couldn’t let it go.”
Davis needed assistance and recruited students from LU’s History Club.
Since May, the club has repaired headstones, and taken inventory. The group also has corrected ledgers that contained errors. The task of preserving the cemeteries in the summer heat have been a challenge, club president Jaqueline Sanchez said.
“It was getting hot over the summer,” she said. “The weather was just not on our side, because then it would rain, like days before, and it would be really muddy.”
Jasmine Garcia, former club president, said believes the ledgers caused the most issues in the preservation process.
“We have a ledger and there’s some inconsistencies with the name spellings, they’re very sporadic,” she said. “So, it’s kind of hard to determine (who is who) based off the ledger. We found someone’s headstone, and we found where they’re at. Then someone will have nothing, they won’t have a headstone. It’s just grass. So, it’s kind of hard to navigate where people are.”
Historic Sacred Spaces has also been working to preserve the Blanchette Cemetery and the Nona Cemetery.
Davis said money and time are the biggest obstacles in the preservation process. Davis registered Pear Orchard and Blanchett cemeteries as historical sites. Davis said the work is her passion project and although she’s able to carry on her work with HSS through donations, she has found it difficult to restore the cemeteries with little help.
“I think the most thing is the financial part of it because the markers are not free,” she said. “Those markers are basically a thousand dollars. When we did Pear Orchard, we had to raise money. Then when we did the Blanchett, someone paid the thousand dollar donation. And when we did Nona, someone else did the thousand dollar donation, so thank god we were able to get that without having to raise money.”
Davis said the preservation requires a lot of people.
“You know, we’re lifting headstones — that’s not easy to do,” she said. “Some of the headstones of the soldiers have slumped down in the ground or fallen over.”
Davis said the reason the cemeteries are in such disarray is due to the lack of care and lack of passion for families to come back to the cemeteries.
“Our grandparents, they were just trying to make it,” she said. “They were in the thick of the segregation war, racism, all those things they were dealing with and fighting on that front. And then they have to deal with somebody dying and a place to bury them, and not only that, but you have to have enough money to bury them.
“I think the lack of passion is just like I said. What our ancestors and our forefathers were going through at the time, they were fighting a heavy battle just to prove they were human.”
The cemeteries are privately owned, and the owner should be responsible for keeping the grass cut and keeping the trees trimmed, Davis said.
Davis and HSS colleague Sandra Castile have sought to bring awareness of the Black cemeteries in Beaumont through college lectures, Facebook and newspapers. Davis recruited the boy scouts to place a sign at Pear Orchard.
Davis said she hopes more people will be willing to help her cause and hopes people won’t turn their backs on the dead. She plans to expand preservation to the historically Black cemeteries to Beaumont’s North End.
“It’s vital for us to stay engaged and do the work,” she said. “We want to work with Lamar (students) and get with the Greek life to come out here and help with documentation.”
To volunteer or for more information, visit the Historical Sacred Spaces Facebook page.
