Bright blue skies brought together The University of Southern Mississippi (USM), Pass Road Elementary School, and The Historical Society of Gulfport to restore cemetery markers and preserve the historic Old Mississippi City Cemetery in Gulfport, Miss.
The groups worked in teams where USM students helped educate and lead proper gravesite cleaning processes. Pass Elementary students chose which headstones to clean, along with a history lesson on the uniqueness of the site. Students learned about identifying grave materials such as granite, marble, limestone, concrete, and wood. Tips on identifying iconography were held along with clearing debris from Hurricane Francine. Dr. Marie Danforth, USM Professor of Anthropology, expressed the success of the cleanup and collaboration.
“This is such a great opportunity for our students to work with the community and be able to share so much of what they have been learning in the classroom. Cemeteries are especially valuable settings for this, and we have worked with several cemeteries in Hattiesburg and the surrounding area over the years, most recently helping to find buried headstones at the cemetery at the Ellisville State School earlier this year,” said Danforth.
The Old Mississippi City was once an important railroad center along the coast in the latter half of the 19th century. The site served as a seat of Harrison County until 1902 with the cemetery in use since 1822. The oldest grave dates to 1841. Currently, the cemetery serves as an ongoing restoration and preservation project of The Historical Society of Gulfport.
Melanie Davis, a Gifted Education teacher at Pass Road Elementary, was happy Southern Miss showed her students expertise in archaeology and anthropology and how to care for local communities continuously. Many students enjoyed clearing off debris from letters and pictures and reading the names of the deceased. Titus Desjardin, a Southern Miss Anthropology graduate student, expresses his gratitude for caring for the gravesite and remembering those who may have been forgotten.
“I was struck by the care given to many of the specific graves, even though the general area was in rough shape. I had originally pictured the cemetery as more or less forgotten. For me, recognizing that people have been actively attending the site in so many small ways made the experience more meaningful; it showed me, despite some of the disrepair, that the cemetery is still a place many people in the community care about and that the work we did could be genuinely valuable to the community,” said Desjardin.
Support for the project was brought by the Southern Miss School of Social Science and Global Studies, along with a Volunteer Mississippi Grant and Gulf Coast Community Foundation Grant from the Pant Santucci Education Fund awarded to elementary schools.