Cemeteries aren’t typically the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about endangered historic places, but more and more people are recognizing the importance of these spaces as keys to understanding community history. The rapidly growing city of Austin, Texas, has seen its share of preservation struggles, including over the care of its historic Oakwood Cemetery, established in 1839 as the city's first cemetery and later listed on the National Register. After years of advocacy work done by Save Austin’s Cemeteries, a nonprofit group assembled by local citizens concerned with the preservation of the city’s five major cemeteries, Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department (PARD), who cares for the cemeteries, created a comprehensive master plan to document the condition of the five cemeteries and recommend best practices for maintenance and improvements.

One project Save Austin’s Cemeteries (SAC) had long been concerned about made it into the Master Plan: Rehabilitating a Gothic Revival-style mortuary chapel on the grounds of Oakwood Cemetery. SAC took the initial steps to advocate for PARD to restore the building, which was suffering from deferred maintenance issues and an unevenly settled foundation, by sponsoring an architectural conditions assessments, a cost estimate, a structural analysis and a geotechnical report on soil conditions. The small chapel—just over 1,000 square feet—was built in 1914, around seventy years after the surrounding Oakwood Cemetery was established in 1839.

It was used as a mortuary chapel where bodies were kept prior to burial and where memorial services were sometimes held. The chapel was built in the section of the cemetery historically designated as "the strangers' ground" and a place where ethnic minorities were laid to rest. In 1944, the city of Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department, who cares for the city’s cemeteries, took over care of the chapel, renovating it and converting it to office space. Deferred maintenance issues led the building to deteriorate so when PARD surveyed the cemetery’s condition, the chapel quickly rose to the top of the list as an obvious first project. Funding for cemetery improvement work from a bond passed by the city in 2012 allowed work to start on a design in late 2014 and construction to begin in October 2016.

The project faced a significant impasse in 2017, while crews were scoping out the work that needed to be done to stabilize the building’s foundation. Burials were uncovered underneath the building, leading the PARD to put a hold on construction while archaeologists came in to excavate what ended up being the remains from 38 burials. The excavation process ended up taking 8 months, but the archaeological work led to the acquisition of additional funding from a hotel occupancy tax program that supports historic preservation projects with potential to encourage tourism within Austin.

PARD turned to the community for thoughts on how to most respectfully address the unexpected discovery, and the remains were sent to the Forensic Archaeology Center at Texas State University to be examined to learn more about the individuals uncovered. An initial review of the most intact burials revealed that they appeared to be a diverse mix of ethnicities, though a more in-depth investigation is still ongoing. Parks staff are working on a plan for how to best commemorate and respectfully reinter the remains, a difficult process with few precedents to model decisions after. "There's a handful of cases we can look at and say, that's a good practice," PARD staff member Sarah Marshall explains, "but I don't necessarily think there's enough that best practices [have been] established."