Long before it became a cemetery, the land that is Oakwood today was home to a fairground and racetrack south of Waco. By the 1870s, the city’s older burial grounds were running out of room, and Waco needed a new cemetery. In 1878, the City purchased 49.5 acres of the former fairgrounds for $4,000 and began laying out cemetery lots, walks, and drives. The first reported burial took place on October 23, 1878, when three-year-old Rose Scott Parrott was laid to rest in what was

There are some people in Oakwood Cemetery whose stories seem almost too large for one lifetime. Dr. Carl Lovelace was one of them. Born in Missouri in 1876, Lovelace arrived in Texas as a boy when his family settled first in Burleson County, then Milam County, before finally making their home in Waco. By the late 1890s, he was part of a rising generation of young Baylor graduates looking outward toward a rapidly changing world. And then, almost immediately after graduation, t

Most people come to Oakwood looking for someone. A parent. A spouse. A grandparent. A familiar name etched into granite. But Oakwood has a way of quietly redirecting your attention. You arrive searching for a person and leave wondering about a symbol carved into the side of a monument… or a stone hand reaching out from a century ago… or why so many obelisks seem to rise above the landscape like frozen prayers. And once you begin noticing those things, it becomes very difficul

Most people come to Oakwood in moments that matter deeply — times of loss, remembrance, and reflection. That’s never lost on us. But every now and then, an idea comes along that doesn’t take anything away from those moments — it simply offers another way to think about this place and what it represents. A while back, Neil deGrasse Tyson — the kind of scientist who can talk about the universe and somehow make it feel both enormous and oddly personal — made an observation about