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Join Friends
of Springhill to Become a Sponsor or Volunteer
Public gardens always need financial
contributions—
But we also need donations of materials—
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Plants
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Landscape timbers, crossties, poles and logs
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Mulch and woodchips
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Manure and organic soil
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Landscape filter material
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Bricks/brickbats and stones
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Gravel/crushed
limestone for parking lot
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Benches and picnic tables
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Birdbaths
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Tom and Valery
Donnelly |
Hernando Civic
Garden Club |
Southeast entry, 2008.
Since then, the pine blew down, 2009. Sign
installed beside old fence corner post, 2011. Thanks artist Brandon
Parker, Northwest Community College welding and surveying students, and
Parks Department!
Most of all, we need volunteers to work.
Volunteer days are second Saturday morning and third Sunday afternoon.
 
THANKS, NORTHWEST MISSISSIPPI COMMUNITY COLLEGE
WELDING AND CIVIL TECHNOLOGY.
If you like what we’re doing—contact your
elected officials in Hernando and Desoto County. The cemetery
lies in Hernando Ward 2 (Andrew Miller, alderman) and in Desoto County
District 5 (Tommy Lewis, supervisor).
THANKS TO ALL OUR VOLUNTEERS AND CONTRIBUTORS--
BNB Ranch, Caldwell, Texas
Gary and Terry Carr
Cathedral Stone Products, Inc.
City of Horn Lake
Community Bank of North Mississippi
www.communitybank.net/
Desoto County Board of Supervisors
Desoto County Co-op
Desoto Garden Club
The Ferguson Family
Hernando Civic Garden Club
Jimbo Mathus and the Mosquitoville Players
www.jimbomathus.com
John Lewis Pickle, Love, MS
Mayor and Aldermen of Hernando
Staff and students of Northwest Mississippi
Community College:
Tommy Watson & Civil Engineering Technology
Department
Shelly Tims & Drafting and Design Technology
Department
Bud Donohou & Environmental Science Organization
and Botany students
Rodney Steele & Welding and Cutting Department
Smith-Phillips law firm
www.smithsphillps.com
Mary Evelyn Starr &
www.deltaarchaeology.us
Tracy Trainham
United States Department of Agriculture Natural
Resources Conservation Service
Jane W. Henderson, Hernando
Mrs. James A. Windsor, Tomball, Texas
THANKS, NORTHWEST STUDENTS!
Not in order--Nick Copeland, Olive Branch; James Roberson III,
Courtland; Taylor Morgan, Senatobia; Zach McCraw, Water Valley; Hudson
Witworth, Tocowa; Casey Rowland, Nesbit; Danté Bennett, Walls; James
Hockman, Hernando; Roger Mason, Byhalia; Romney Tucker, Southaven;
Anthony Smith, Oxford; Matt Wilson, Batesville; Shannon Baldwin, Olive
Branch; Robert Tucker, Water Valley; Joshua S. Smith, Southaven, Jim
Roberson, Justin Vanderford, Matt Garrard, Jazeman Adams, Kamika
Mitchell, Cornelius Coleman, Mitch Houston, Joseph Brown, from the
Spring 2011 Cutting and Welding class, as well as last year's students
who worked on building the sign.
Why Save
Springhill as an Historic Memorial Garden?
As the population of Desoto county is growing
rapidly, and is expected to continue to grow, there is an
ever-increasing need for public green space. It would be much better to
preserve this historic site as parkland near the center of Hernando now than to have to buy land for
parks later. Springhill lies along a proposed pedestrian and bike route.
There are young woods, grass and a few old trees on the lot now, and
kudzu control has begun. The cemetery about 90% nineteenth century
markers, with very few after 1900. As such, it is probably eligible for
the National Register of Historic Places and for designation as a
Mississippi Landmark.
Springhill is a significant cultural remain from
the first days of Hernando. Southern cemeteries are architectural
monuments, in a folk tradition that had both tradition-structured placement of
materials and use of formal design elements. For instance Springhill
still has some of the traditional cedars, vinca and other flowers as
well as the native hardwood timber. Cemeteries can also be “read” at a
symbolic level as the outcome of social and economic forces. The most
obvious instance is the fact that white people got the top of the hill
while black people got the side and bottom of the hill, as is almost
always the case, even if the "hill" is only a foot high. The
nineteenth century was a time of great mobility, as as the cotton
frontier expanded, many families from the old colonies spent some time
the Desoto County before moving further west. While Springhill has
artistically important monuments to early officials of the city and
county, and other prosperous tradesmen and merchants, not all members of
society were afforded tombstones; very few slaves and most Freedmen and
poor working, widowed and orphaned whites were not represented with
stone monuments, but they may have had wooden markers, artifacts or
plants on their graves. It is likely that remotes sensing would reveal
hundreds of their unmarked graves. Preserving the old public burial ground as public green
space with the native and historic vegetation would be a fitting tribute
to the our ancestors who first cleared and settled North Mississippi.
Plantation Burial, 1860. John Antrobus, English
artist active in Montgomery and New Orleans in the 1850s.
In Georgia, in 2011, Columbus city council and managers are considering
making the African-American cemetery begun by slaves in the 1830s
(contemporary with Springhill) into a tranquility garden. Emory
University in Atlanta has a African Origin project and webpage using the
legal cases of thousands of African rescued from slave trades after the
slave trade was outlawed to try to connect the tribes raided by slavers
with modern regions, languages and ethnic groups.
If you would like to stay informed about
future events promoting the conservation and restoration of Hernando's
first cemetery and want to be included on the friends of Springhill
Historic Memorial Garden Trust mailing list, please fill and return the
attached pdf:
Membership form.pdf
Please mail to:
Springhill Cemetery c/o N.C. "Tom" Ferguson
P.O. Box 189
Hernando MS 38632
Or E-mail it to:
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