Austin Parks website offers virtual tours of Oakwood Cemetery, exhibits
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Oakwood Cemetery is a free historical site for Austin residents and visitors to tour and explore, but the city's Park and Recreation Department has made it even more accessible to the rest of the world.
Jennifer Chenoweth, the Oakwood Cemetery museum site coordinator for Austin Parks and Recreation, said that the project is an important way for Austin residents to connect with the city's history.
"Austin's contemporary life and community is really different than historic Austin and but we all want to feel like we belong here and understand our home. Without a way to learn about our past, we feel disconnected," Chenoweth said. "This project helps us understand who we are in Austin and who we want to be. It helps us tie the past to the future."
The Oakwood Legacy website includes 3D scans of the cemetery's chapel and sections of the grounds. Those sections are the final resting places for more than 4,000 people, the majority of whom were African American and buried in unmarked graves.
"There are only 300 headstones for people in that area, and there's not very good records about where all the others are buried," she said. "It's evidence that these people were just as disregarded in death as they were in life, and segregated for both race and class. They were the ones who built Austin."
One reason for the 3D imaging project was to provide access to the international African diaspora, Chenoweth said. Visitors to the website can use a VR headset or smartphone to "tour" the sections.
"A lot of the monuments that people will see when they visit Oakwood are big, fancy, expensive granite monuments that were placed at the time by people who could afford to do that, and it ends up being a signpost for their importance," Chenoweth notes. "Just because your family could not afford to, or were not allowed to, place some monuments at your family's grave didn't mean that they didn't contribute materially to building Austin."
The website also includes virtual exhibits from a wide assortment of city, state and national organizations, including the Austin Fire Department and Huston-Tillotson University.