When daffodils last in the graveyard bloomed, the pandemic forced the Mount Holly Cemetery Association to cancel its spring picnic.
As the threat of covid worsened in summer 2020, gardeners could not gather with the Downtown Dames for horticulture talks, and guides couldn't lead tours among Mount Holly's historic monuments. In fall, the drama students of Parkview Arts and Science Magnet High School couldn't present their massively popular "Tales of the Crypt."
The cancellation of those fundraising opportunities didn't cancel the need for funds to maintain an active cemetery that holds so many of the state's most storied residents that it's called "Arkansas' Westminster Abbey."
"There's constant maintenance," association board member Lenora Steinkamp explains, "whether you have an old house or an old cemetery." This old place has three wood-frame houses and a sizable city mausoleum in need of tending, as well as towering trees that shed leaves and limbs and sometimes fall to storms; routine lawn work; antique monuments under endless attack by weather and also, rarely, by vandals ...
And every so often cars slam into the stone and wrought-iron perimeter walls. The 13th Street wall was damaged in a car wreck in 1999. In 2011, an SUV bounced along the Broadway wall, doing $35,000 in damage. In 2017, a driver clobbered one of the pillars in the entrance gate on Broadway. And in November, as if pandemic cancellations hadn't caused enough financial hardship, a Ford Fiesta demolished 20 feet of that south-facing 13th Street stone wall.
Meanwhile, "we are dependant on donations," says Katharine Adams, who also serves on the board.
As the date of this year's spring picnic approaches, things are looking better covidwise, but Mount Holly still can't invite in hundreds of donors for boxed meals and entertainment. And so -- in a first for the 178-year-old cemetery -- the Spring Picnic on the Grounds will be a drive-through event from 4:30-6:30 p.m. April 25.
Not the kind of drive-through that requires sexton Steve Adams to hire a stone mason, this will be a merry procession of donors seated inside their automobiles. Yes, that is a little odd. But what isn't these days?
Cars are to line up on South Gaines Street and enter the northwestern gate near the city mausoleum. Following directions of volunteers, donors will creep along until they exit onto Broadway. Along their way, they can pick up a boxed meal and enjoy live entertainment.
Board member Judy Goss reports that, through the generosity of Parkview teachers Tamara Zinck, Mary Shollmier and Pam Ellis, high school actors in historic costume will stroll the lanes; madrigal groups will sing songs from the 1800s, and a string quartet will perform.
Donors won't get to mingle for cheek-to-cheek selfies beside Victorian monuments, but as board member Susan Borné says, the event will help them to "keep a connection with Mount Holly, to sort of keep us on their radar to come and visit" -- while maintaining social distancing, so they won't have to take up prematurely permanent residence in the columbarium.
(Speaking of which, Borné confirms that a second columbarium is in the works.)
Donated to the city by early Arkansas lawyers Chester Ashley and Roswell Beebe in 1843, Mount Holly became the final resting place of politicians, poets and legends. The list of notable dead usually starts with 11 governors, five U.S. senators, 22 mayors ... all white men. But Mount Holly holds the graves of all kinds of people, including a few historic Black residents and female suffragists, writers and activists.
Steinkamp says she didn't know that history when she moved downtown in 1976.
"During those days this was our park," she says. "If you went walking every day, you walked through the park. I didn't really know anything about Mount Holly at the time I moved downtown. I began to appreciate it more and more, and the more time you spend here the more you see things that you didn't see before."
Some people admire the monuments and others study the history of the dead, she says, and many seek solace in the beauty of the place.
"Every season is different here," Steinkamp says. "There is a period of time, I think it's early spring, when it looks like snow is falling from all the trees with blossoms. And it is just breathtaking."
Board members were glad that the gates stayed open in 2020 so weary and grieving citizens had recourse to the peaceful grounds. When covid restrictions weighed on her, Adams would visit with her 12- and 14-year-old daughters. "We brought our gardening tools and went over to our family plot and pulled weeds," she says, "to be outdoors and enjoy the springtime."
It reminded her of Sunday picnics at Mount Holly with her grandmother, Pauline "PLD" Watson, a longtime board member who died in 2008. "Mount Holly was part of my rearing growing up," she says. But most of the people buried at Mount Holly no longer have family available to garden on their graves, so the association and Arkansas Master Gardeners tend them.
Steinkamp likes thinking about the women who created the cemetery association in 1915. They were appalled by how casually Mount Holly was treated by an association of city businessmen who had taken it in charge. "This land belongs to the city," she says, "and yet there was no one taking care of it."
"They had cows on the property," Adams says, "walking through the graves."
Steinkamp adds, "Finances were a disaster. And this group of women said, 'OK, we need to do something.' Women always come forward, don't we?"
Because of the work begun by those women, she says, Mount Holly today is well maintained. She especially loves it when the antique New Dawn roses clamber over the perimeter walls in pink profusion. Recently she completed her certificate to become a Master Gardener and has been assigned to the volunteer crew that keeps those thorny climbing roses under control.
So her connection to Mount Holly is emotional, horticultural and also a bit ironical: "My husband's father lived on Arch Street and actually, when he was I don't know what age, he took the family car and he ran it into the wall just a little bit below the gate" -- the same area that was damaged in November.
"And the odd thing about it," she says, "not too far from that is where our remains will go. It's the continuing circle of life!"
Mount Holly Cemetery at 1200 S. Broadway is open to the public every day, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. in the summer and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. in the winter. Reservations for the Drive-Through Spring Picnic, 4:30-6:30 p.m. April 25, will cost $75 per person and will be available through a mailing to existing donors and also through the website mounthollycemetery.org. More information is at (501) 376-1843.