The Future of Our Past

A message from the Woodland Cemetery Stewardship Committee

Cemetery Chronicles is a series on the honored inhabitants of Clemson’s Woodland Cemetery, better known as Cemetery Hill. For more information about the cemetery’s historical value, contact Matt Dunbar at tigeray@alumni.clemson.edu.

To support its preservation and research, you can make a gift through the enclosed envelope and designate it for the “Cemetery Hill Preservation Fund.”

 

Woodland Cemetery Stewardship Committee

Wil Brasington ’00, chair

Matt Dunbar ’99

Jim Hendrix ’98

Bobby McCormick ’72, M ’74, BB&T Scholar

Don McKale, Class of ’41 Memorial Professor of Humanities

Gerald Vander Mey, Campus Master Planner

Tom Wooten, Alumni Distinguished Professor

Sonya Goodman (ex officio member), Facilities Support

Patricia McAbee (ex officio member), Clemson Trustee

 

Summer 2004 -- Vol. 57, No. 3

As President of Clemson University, I feel I have been given a sacred trust — the obligation to lead our community into the future while preserving and honoring our past. There is no place in which this sacred trust is more tangible than Woodland Cemetery, more commonly known as Cemetery Hill.

— James F. Barker

With these words, written in December 2000, President Jim Barker established the Woodland Cemetery Stewardship Committee and charged it to protect and enhance the integrity, character and traditions of Cemetery Hill.

As part of that important responsibility, we launched “Cemetery Chronicles” in the summer 2001 issue of Clemson World, inviting several authors to help us look back at Clemson’s history, recognizing and remembering some of the legends who earned their honored resting places upon the sacred grounds of Cemetery Hill.

In this installment of Cemetery Chronicles, we interrupt our stories of the past to focus on Clemson’s future, offering a vision for ensuring that Cemetery Hill will continue to stand as a special tribute to the spirit of the Clemson Family for generations to come.

Although Cemetery Chronicles has been the most public facet of the work of the Woodland Cemetery Stewardship Committee to date, it is only a small portion of the committee’s efforts to help protect that “sacred trust” of which President Barker eloquently wrote. In his “Goals for Making Clemson a Top-20 Public Institution,” President Barker further defined that trust and emphasized the delicate balance between focusing on the future and appreciating the past. Among the specific initiatives outlined within the goals is to “recognize and appreciate Clemson’s distinctiveness.”

Because Cemetery Hill is not only an integral part of Clemson history, but also a unique narrator of that story through the voices of those interred there, the cemetery is truly one of Clemson’s most richly distinctive features. As a stewardship committee, we are working to ensure that the sacred grounds of Cemetery Hill remain not only a distinctive part of Clemson’s past, but also a proud part of its future.

Among the many issues that require careful attention if the cemetery is to be preserved and enhanced are diligent erosion control, careful tree management, thoughtful aesthetic improvements, potential expansion plans and the completion of research to determine if there are any unmarked graves within the cemetery.

Over the past three years, the committee has taken several important steps toward addressing these needs, including:

  • Trustee approval for expanded cemetery boundaries to protect the grounds and allow for future expansion.
  • Replacement of the chain-link fence around the crown of Cemetery Hill with more fitting and aesthetically pleasing hedges.
  • Approval of a tree management plan, particularly related to mitigating the effects of pine beetle damage.
  • Agreement with the S.C. state archaeologist to use ground-penetrating radar to search for potential unmarked grave sites.
  • Establishment of an annual Woodland Cemetery Tour program, to be expanded later this year.

With these milestones accomplished, the stage is now set for us to take an important step forward in preserving and protecting the Woodland Cemetery. The stewardship committee recently adopted a long-range developmental plan that will further protect the intimate tranquility of the cemetery while enhancing its aesthetics and addressing key maintenance concerns. The three-phase plan calls for the creation of a new set of stone entry gates along Williamson Road, an entry court leading to the traditional cemetery burial area and a stone-and-wrought-iron garden wall to replace the recently removed chain-link fence. The following descriptions and illustrations highlight the details of the plan.

  • Phase one — Remove chain-link fence, replace with hedges to provide safety barrier and erosion control (completed). Construct new set of stone entry gates along Williamson Road. Add landscap- ing around new and existing gates.
  • Phase two — Install brick-paved, terraced forecourt and angled parking to replace existing asphalt parking lot.
  • Phase three — Build stone-and-wrought-iron retaining wall around the crown of the cemetery to improve aesthetics and mitigate erosion. Install corner markers to define the outer boundaries of the cemetery and add landscaping along Williamson Road to further define the cemetery grounds.

In the past three years, with generous assistance from several individuals and organizations, over $170,000 has been raised toward the total estimated cost of $585,000 for the project. That tremendous momentum has allowed us to launch the earliest portions of phase one, but in order to make Cemetery Hill the kind of historically defining monument it deserves to be, we need your help in completing all three phases of the project. Please consider yourself a steward with us of Clemson’s proud and distinctive heritage, and please consider contributing a portion of your Clemson Fund gift this year to the Cemetery Preservation Fund.

It was 80 years ago this past January when President Walter Merritt Riggs became the first Clemson employee to be buried in the “faculty cemetery” that Riggs himself had proposed to the Board of Trustees. As we reflect on the vision and service of President Riggs and the others who have followed him to their final resting places nearby, we are struck by the seeming irony that so much energy is being poured into a place that is normally associated with the somber idea of death. We believe there is something wonderfully telling, indeed distinctive, about that contrast and the very nature of our Woodland Cemetery. Cemetery Hill is not just a place where we lay to rest our deceased forebears, it is in fact a woodland cemetery, a place characterized and appropriately named for the abundant life present in the trees that define and protect that special place.

So it is that we can look to the Woodland Cemetery not as a sad reminder of lives lost, but rather as an inspiring tribute to lives well lived and greatness achieved through service to Clemson and her people. Just as the trees there take root and flourish and fade and die, later to be replenished by new life and new strength from the seeds they left behind, so it is with the lifeblood of Clemson, handed off from one generation to another, the seeds of vibrant young lives nurtured by those who have served before. Yes, there is much that is alive in our distinctive Woodland Cemetery — not just those majestic trees but also the enduring legacies of the men and women who now rest eternally under their shade. Both serve as powerful symbols of the lives that grow and find nourishment at Clemson, adding deepest meaning to the words engraved on the headstone of J.C. Littlejohn, words that can serve as an epitaph for all those who rest in the Woodland Cemetery: their “monuments live about you.”

For all the lives that have served Clemson faithfully in the past and for all those who will do so in the future, we are truly grateful. We invite you to help us perpetuate that noble cycle of Clemson University, enriching lives and paying them tribute through your generous contribution to the Cemetery Preservation Fund. Your monuments will live about you.