Vandalism at Little Rock's historic Mount Holly Cemetery this week came just days before an annual fundraiser to help preserve the grounds of the cemetery, founded in 1843.
Mount Holly Spring Picnic attendees this year will see broken and defaced century-old statues and markers in the center of the cemetery grounds. The vandalism was discovered Wednesday morning.
A preliminary estimate of the damage was $290,000, according to a police report. There were no leads in the investigation into the vandalism as of Thursday afternoon, a Little Rock police spokesman said. Two security cameras on the grounds were inoperable, the police report said.
"We have to raise the funds to maintain the cemetery," Frances Cranford, president of the nonprofit Mount Holly Cemetery Association's board of directors, said Thursday at the cemetery. "It's enough dealing with natural disasters and its age. It's the senseless act of vandalism I don't understand.
"Mount Holly is a treasure not only for Little Rock, but for the state," she said.
The Mount Holly Spring Picnic, held at the cemetery on the last Sunday of every April, will be 5-7 p.m. Sunday, Cranford said. About 150 guests are expected at the event to raise money for the association's preservation efforts.
The association cares for the grounds of the four-square-block cemetery, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. Among the graves are those of 11 Arkansas governors, 22 Little Rock mayors and five Confederate generals.
The worst of the damage from this week's vandalism appeared to be inflicted upon the life-size marble statues of two sisters, Martha Parma Basham, Dec. 3, 1882-Aug. 10, 1887, and Pearl Reed Basham, July 22, 1880-Nov. 7, 1886, and an adjacent marble "mourner" statue.
Broken off at the ankles, two pairs of tiny, bare feet of marble are all that's left to be seen of the sisters' statues, which are "probably irreplaceable," Cranford said.
The mourner statue, more than a century old and over 5 feet tall, had been pushed off its base and broken into three large pieces. That sculpture overlooked the nearby graves of the girls' parents, Confederate soldier George Leftridge Basham and his wife, Julia Parma Beall Basham.
A marble cross that also was broken had been at the graves of Moorhead Wright, a Spanish-American War veteran and prominent Arkansas businessman, and his wife, Hildegarde Wright. Four other grave markers were defaced, and the U.S. flag and Arkansas flag also were lowered and destroyed. Some broken marker pieces have been moved to storage to preserve them, Cranford said.
"They took down the Arkansas flag and the American flag and shred them," Cranford said. "The pole is loose now, and the ropes aren't right. That's why there are no flags on the pole now. It's just a mean, senseless act."
A metal marker was broken and used to deface the other markers and probably used to break up the statues of Martha and Pearl Basham and the mourner statue, Cranford said. The girls' statues were about 4 feet tall and made of Italian Carrara marble in each girl's likeness.
"I don't know how they could have broken up those Basham girls' statues otherwise without using something," Cranford said.
How the damage will -- or can -- be repaired isn't yet known, she said.
The Basham girls' likenesses were created by an unknown sculptor in Italy from photographs. They are so detailed that one story is that the parents so disliked the sculpture depicting one of the daughters that they returned it to have a replacement made, Cranford said.
"There's no way we could get new ones," Cranford said.
Metro on 04/22/2016