CAMDEN — This weekend, the usually quiet residents of Oakland Cemetery will get a bit more talkative as the Camden Historical Society hosts its 2019 Fall Cemetery Walk.
2019 All Hallows Eve Cemetery Walk will begin at 6:30 p.m. from Friday, Oct. 18-19 at Oakland Cemetery, located on Maul Road across from Zion Hill Baptist Church. Tickets for adults are $7, and tickets for children up to high-school age are $2. The ticket table will be located on the Zion Hill Baptist Church parking lot.
Event goers will travel from grave to grave and hear the historic lives of those interred within as told by actors in period-specific clothing. The lives and deaths of the figures are researched by the historical society and scripts are produced detailing the events of the departed.
This year’s round of characters includes merchants, lawyers and luminaries from days of yore and will regale crowds with tales of the Civil War, stage coach lines and steamboats moving up and down the Ouachita River.
The event is family friendly and all ages are invited.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas.net states: “Oakland Cemetery in Camden (Ouachita County) was the first cemetery of that city and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It encompasses approximately twenty acres and has approximately 683 graves. The cemetery’s Forrest Hill entombs Confederates who died in battle near Camden at both the Engagement at Poison Springs on April 18, 1864, and the Action at Marks’ Mills on April 25, 1864.
“The land for the cemetery was donated by Major William Bradley in the early 1830s. The first known grave bears a monument reading, ‘First grave in Cemetery. The body of an unknown little girl who died on a flat-bottom boat on the Ouachita River was buried before 1840. Chain around the grave was from old anchor chain from the boat.’ The first tombstone to be placed there was in memory of Thomas Stone, a slaveholder from Autauga County, Alabama, who had relocated to Camden in 1843 and died two years later. The obelisk that still surmounts his grave was shipped from New Orleans by steamboat.”
Tours will take place continuously during the night from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the cemetery, which was established in 1833. Many of the early monuments erected there were imported, according to the Historical Society, and they are unique and irreplaceable.
For more information, contact the Ouachita County Historical Society at 870-836-9243 or [email protected].