Enid Cemetery and Calvary Catholic Cemetery

About this property

The Enid Cemetery is a cemetery in Enid, Oklahoma. Together with the Calvary Catholic Cemetery, it has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1996. Opened in the 1890s, the two cemeteries were designed in the rural cemetery style. Only a portion of the Enid Cemetery contributes to the historical significance: the Original (1898), First (1918), Second (1920), and Evergreen (1923) additions. Together these encompass a 967 by 1,318-foot (402 m) area historical section. Enid's earliest graves were located on the Hymen and Cora Anderson farm land, following the death of their one-year-old son Lee Stuart in 1897. Lee Stuart's grave was joined by those of an elderly man, Peter J. Bradley, and a young black child named Johnson a few weeks later. Anderson deeded 15 acres (61,000 m2) of his land to the city in 1898 for use as a cemetery. In April 1898, a 10.5-acre (42,000 m2) section of the Anderson land was deeded to Enid's St. Francis Xavier congregation led by Bishop Theophile Meerschaert. In 1913, the Enid Cemetery Association bought 10 more acres from Zachary Taylor which would become the First and Second Additions. In 1929, the Enid Cemetery Association expanded the Calvary land by 2 additional acres. The Calvary Catholic Cemetery contains a mausoleum built in 1904 for Ruth Sara Kennedy from white marble in the Neo-Classical Revival style. The Enid Cemetery contains a white Georgia marble Art Deco, Neo-Classical Revival styled mausoleum built in 1921 by the Economy Mausoleum Company, a red brick Mission Revival style tool shed from 1927, and an Art Deco gate, reading Enid Cemetery 1897. James T. Douthitt, an original homesteader, who was shot by his wife, Dollie in 1904. Later, Dollie Douthitt also wounded several people during a courthouse shooting spree. Fredrick and Susan Dresser, original homesteaders who lived inside a dug-out creek bank, unable to afford construction of a house. Black people were interred in Potter's Field during segregation, and had a separate entrance to the cemetery. The plots in this section were the least expensive, and many of the graves are unmarked. Local legend holds that Boston Corbett, who shot the assassin John Wilkes Booth is buried in one of these unmarked graves. Corbett was known to have peddled medicine in Enid for W.W. Garrit and Company of Topeka. More famous to the Enid area, is a corpse that never received a burial—that of David E. George, a drifter, who claimed to be Booth himself, and committed suicide in Enid's Grand Hotel in 1903. His body, ultimately claimed by his lawyer, Finis L. Bates, went on a nationwide tour for over 50 years before ultimately disappearing.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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