FRIENDS OF
SPRINGHILL
Historic Memorial Garden
ADDITIONAL REASONS TO JOIN

Public property is your property and your responsibility!

The city and county can only afford basic maintenance—

YOUR support is essential!

Please visit Springhill Cemetery often, but respect this historic sacred space--

No dogs, bikes or ATVs
Don’t litter
Don’t sit or lean on monuments
Don’t scrape or apply chalk to monuments
Springhill Cemetery is located in Hernando, Desoto County, Mississippi on 5 grassy and wooded acres at the northwest corner of the intersection of Oak Grove Road and Church Street/Robinson Gin Road, southwest of the Square and east of the Middle School in the West End neighborhood. Visit us soon for a walk or picnic. Please, no dogs or bike riding on grounds.
JOIN FRIENDS OF SPRINGHILL TO BECOME A SPONSOR OR VOLUNTEER
FRIENDS OF
SPRINGHILL

Public gardens always need financial contributions—
But we also need donations of materials—
Plants
Landscape timbers, crossties, poles and logs
Mulch and woodchips
Manure and organic soil
Landscape filter material
Bricks/brickbats and stones
Gravel/crushed limestone for parking lot
Benches and picnic tables
Birdbaths
Most of all, we need volunteers to work. Volunteer days are second Saturday morning and third Sunday afternoon
Historic Memorial Garden
WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP

Any work at the Springhill Cemetery has to be carried out in cooperation with the city public works department. The collaboration of civic groups is sought as well. The cemetery has the potential to contribute to the larger heritage tourism industry, but it would need significant investments to make it an attractive resource.

Volunteer contributions of time, labor and materials will be used whenever possible. This should include schools and other youth programs, which can both contribute to the enhancement of the site and allow kids to learn while doing so. As Springhill Cemetery is within a block of the public middle school, it should be considered a resource for the school, with the potential for real-world science labs as well as history projects. All garden work teaches perseverance, thoroughness, forward-thinking and long-term planning. Visible and real accomplishments teach self-respect and an appreciation of the returns of labor. Each weekend that volunteers work, we make a little progress in reclaiming Springhill Cemetery from kudzu, honeysuckle and privet hedge. Whenever possible, participants should be given surplus bulbs, seedlings and cuttings for their own yards and encourage them to think of the cemetery as a community asset. It is only thru an investment and commitment of the young people of the area that this project will be a success, because the trees we planted in 2011 will take 50 to 100 years to mature.
The tombstones at Springhill vary from good condition to badly fragmented. While there are only about 100 monuments, there a probably hundreds of unmarked graves. The only way to find out is through remote sensing and more traditional types of archaeology. Like gardening, archaeology is time-consuming as well as educational work. We would like to do any conservation (repairs) to monuments in keeping with best practices, and to use the work to hold a public seminar and laboratory in cemetery conservation for representatives of local cemeteries.