AUSTIN, Texas — Taking steps to understand Oakwood Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in the city of Austin, is a mission for Melissa Rogers, the president of Save Austin's Cemeteries.
Rogers calls Oakwood a "snapshot" of our society.
"In the frontier days, everyone ended up buried here. The famous people, the people who were just your laborers, farmers, ministers, the enslaved population, ended up here," Rogers said.
But Rogers said there are challenges to protecting this part of history, like finding grave markers that will not disintegrate.
"A lot of cemeteries, Oakwood included ... people didn't really recognize the importance of preserving cemeteries and recognized the importance of the history on them, so there was a lot of deterioration," Rogers said. "You have a lot of markers that have through the years, whether age fallen over or on the ground. How do you preserve that?"
To share the importance of preservation at Oakwood Cemetery, Save Austin's Cemeteries hosts a spring tour that features actors at the grave sites, giving people a visual description of the people and the legacy they've left behind.
This year, the tour is featuring the history of firefighters.
Native Austinite Jan Root is taking some lessons from the tour to heart.
"It's changed so much over the years, going from a volunteer fire department into an organized city department, so just the way of life back then to the difference in the way they had to fight fires compared to the way they fight fires now," Root said.
In a city filled with transplants, Rogers hopes visitors can embrace their own history by recognizing the people that once built this city.
"It gives you that connection to a place and really, you realize, hopefully, how important you are to the story," Rogers said.
For more information on Save Austin's Cemeteries, click here.