Dallas, TX
Here lies Dallas: Sparkman-Hillcrest wins Preservation Dallas honor – Preston Hollow
Images by Johnathan Johnson
There’s a place in Dallas the place 9 of our metropolis’s most necessary architects, one of many world’s biggest bluesmen, a soccer saint, an Oscar winner and a sheriff who helped take down Bonnie and Clyde are remembered.
Sparkman-Hillcrest Funeral Residence and Memorial Park’s 88 acres are the ultimate resting locations of a few of Dallas’ most distinguished residents, in addition to a number of all-American characters.
Baseball Corridor-of-Famer Mickey Mantle is right here. So is former Texas Gov. W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel.
Sparkman-Hillcrest’s historical past as a burial floor precedes the incorporation of Dallas as a metropolis, and the cemetery just lately received the Stewardship Award from Preservation Dallas.
Images by Johnathan Johnson
Within the Forties, the Caruth household owned about 30,000 acres in Dallas and the encircling space, together with the eventual websites of SMU, NorthPark Middle and Sparkman-Hillcrest. When William Barr Caruth arrived in Dallas from Kentucky in 1848, he introduced a number of enslaved individuals, together with Edward “Ned” Fields, in response to “Slavery and the Postbellum College: The Case of SMU,” a regulation journal article by Lolita Buckner Inniss and Skyler Arbuckle, revealed in 2021.
Sparkman-Hillcrest holds the graves of enslaved individuals who labored on Caruth’s plantation and died within the 1850s.
Images by Johnathan Johnson
“The fashion of his structure is pure and classical, reflecting honesty and purity of coronary heart.” —Preservation Dallas
Undertaker George W. Loudermilk started buying land from the Caruths for the cemetery in 1893, in response to compiled family tree analysis on findagrave.com.
“Loudermilk matched groups of horses and fantastically outfitted carriages sporting ‘the one rubber tires within the metropolis’ which grew to become a supply of nice satisfaction,” states a historical past from Preservation Dallas. “Because the enterprise entered the age of the auto, hearses had been the unique ambulances for transporting the sick to hospitals in addition to the deceased to the burial ceremony.”
The primary of 4 generations of the Sparkman household started working the cemetery in 1920, when Will R. Sparkman bought it and operated underneath the title Loudermilk-Sparkman for a few years.
Sparkman moved his enterprise to the previous Belo Mansion in 1926, leasing it for 50 years. The mansion, which nonetheless stands at Ross and Pearl streets Downtown, has been renamed the Arts District Mansion.
This was the place the physique of the outlaw Clyde Barrow was positioned on public view in 1934, drawing large strains of crowds.
Architect Anton Korn designed the Hillcrest Mausoleum, which opened in 1937. Korn additionally constructed grand properties in Highland Park and Lakewood.
“The fashion of his structure is pure and classical, reflecting honesty and purity of coronary heart,” Preservation Dallas states.
Listed here are a number of of the well-known individuals buried at Sparkman-Hillcrest, situated at 7405 W. Northwest Freeway.
Images by Johnathan Johnson
Freddie King is called a Chicago bluesman, as a result of that’s the place he grew to become identified, however he was born in Gilmer, Texas, and lived in Dallas on the finish of his life. Within the Nineteen Seventies, he carried out at venues round city, such because the legendary Mom Blues on Lemmon Avenue. He lived a tough lifetime of consuming and touring and died of issues with pancreatitis at age 42 in 1976. King was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Corridor of Fame in 2012.
Tom Landry wants no introduction round right here. He was the primary head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, main the workforce for 29 years. Do you know he had a grasp’s diploma in industrial engineering? That he performed seven seasons {of professional} soccer earlier than changing into an NFL coach? He died of leukemia in 2000 at age 75, and the honors he has obtained are too quite a few to call.
Greer Garson obtained seven best-actress Oscar award nominations, successful in 1942 for Mrs. Miniver. Garson was from England, however her third husband was a Texas oilman and horse breeder, and so they lived part-time in Dallas beginning within the Sixties. She based the Greer Garson Theatre at Southern Methodist College. She died of coronary heart failure in 1996 at age 91.
Ted Hinton knew Bonnie Parker when she was a waitress at Marco’s Café in Previous East Dallas, and he later admitted to having a crush on her. He was a 29-year-old Dallas deputy sheriff in 1934 when he grew to become a part of the posse of lawmen who ambushed Bonnie and Clyde at Gibsland, Louisiana. Hinton’s son, the previous Dallas County deputy Linton Jay “Boots” Hinton, operated the Ambush Museum in Gibsland from 2004 till his dying in 2016. Ted Hinton died in 1977.