Audio By Carbonatix
On November 29, Linda Dennis sent Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk a letter containing what may well be the last and weirdest claim made against the city this century.
Dennis, a Dallas native whose family has deep roots in the city, announced she was formally claiming an eighth of an acre of land located somewhere near or beneath the Dallas Convention Center. Dennis also asked what should be a simple question: Where did the city put her dead relatives, particularly Nancy and William Tuberville?
In all likelihood, the Tuberville bodies will never be located, but already Dennis has learned one thing that she thinks other Dallas residents should know: Even the dead can’t trust City Hall.
City officials are not inclined to entertain the notion that Dennis has a legitimate right to the land beneath the city’s No. 1 tourist attraction — a claim she’s been making for several months. In fact, the very mention of the Tuberville name causes various employees who have encountered Dennis to yowl like cats stuck in the rain.
“Oooohhhh, go away,” said one woman, who recently answered the phone for Wilhemina Boyd, director of the city department that operates the Convention Center. “You can’t believe everything you hear. Go away!”
Oddly enough, that statement is the perfect explanation for this bizarre situation. Dennis is pursuing her macabre quest precisely because she doesn’t believe what the city employees are telling her.
“It’s like they beat around the bush and they don’t tell you anything,” says Dennis, a homemaker. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I tuck tail and walk away. But if I’m right, I don’t mind going down and picketing or whatever…I’m one of those people you hear about who doesn’t have anything better to do with her time.”
After Dennis says this, she laughs. It is an old and hearty laugh, perhaps one she inherited from her great-grandmother Nancy Tuberville, the person responsible for this mess in the first place.
In the late 1800s, Nancy and William Tuberville, a grocer, lived on land now covered by the Convention Center and its grounds. In 1871, according to a deed on file with the Dallas County Clerk’s office, Nancy Tuberville sold a three-acre parcel to Henry Ervay, then mayor of Dallas, for $503.12. As part of the deal, the land was to be used as a public cemetery “forever” with the exception of one section, an eighth of an acre that Nancy reserved as a “family burying ground to include the grave of my late husband [William] Tuberville, dead, and such others of our family as I may wish to be layed off as I may desire.”
Dennis, who lives in Lewisville, says she had heard stories about her ancestors buried beneath the Convention Center, but she never thought much about them until September, when she saw a news report about how the city was excavating 15 unidentified graves as part of the Convention Center’s expansion.
“I thought this could be my ancestors,” recalls Dennis, who promptly headed downtown. When she got to the excavation site, a camera in hand, Dennis says, the runaround began. “This lady came crowing out of the hole and said, ‘You’re not taking pictures.'”
But the command only piqued Dennis’ curiosity, and soon she was wading through the city’s bureaucracy, getting referred from one department to the next and finding no answers along the way. In late September, her hopes were momentarily raised when she received a letter from Boyd, who confirmed that Nancy Tuberville did indeed sell three acres of land to the city and reserve an eighth of an acre of it as a family cemetery.
The letter, however, went on to explain that because the land was subsequently sold to one C. S. Newton in 1922, Nancy Tuberville’s deed was “decertified and is no longer valid.” Boyd told the Dallas Observer that the city did not “just indiscriminately start digging or taking people’s land away.”
Boyd is right about the subsequent sale, which is recorded in another document on file with the county clerk. The problem is, deeds are not typically “decertified,” according to employees at the clerk’s office, the city tax office, and the county appraisal district, all of whom recently agreed that they have never heard of such a thing.
It is possible that the original deed was somehow declared invalid, according to other county records that show the land in question was the subject of litigation over the years. But even if the deed was declared invalid and the cemetery cleared to make way for development, the city should have reburied the bodies and kept a record of what it did with them.
With the exception of Nancy Tuberville’s original deed, no known records exist to show where the Tubervilles are buried or whether they were moved. In fact, a copy of a 1958 survey of the land suggests that the city officials then believed that the original deed was still in effect and that the area had been mapped out as a cemetery.
When pressed to explain what she means by decertified, Boyd’s explanation grows weak. “Some of the information is sketchy,” she concedes. “I responded based on what I could find. I couldn’t find everything that she needed to know. I’m not an expert on that.”
Boyd then referred questions about the old deeds to Gay DeHoff, the director of the city’s property management department. DeHoff, however, says she doesn’t know anything about deeds and decertification. Instead, the only document she found was an old plat, which mapped out some cemetery plots near the Convention Center. By imposing a modern plat on top of the old plat, DeHoff says, she was able to estimate that the one-eighth of an acre in question is located somewhere between the front doors of the convention center and Pioneer Plaza — not where the 15 bodies were found.
“The Tubervilles were definitely northeast of where the Convention Center is now,” says DeHoff, who sounded eager to rule out the possibility that the Tubervilles are underneath the building. “The unknown fact becomes, were they actually buried there?”
And if the bodies the city dug up weren’t the Tubervilles, then who were they?
Local cemetery expert Frances James, who attempted to research the case on behalf of the city contractor that conducted the excavation, doesn’t necessarily agree with DeHoff’s map work. Rather, she thinks the Tubervilles are buried beneath the building. And, given the absence of records, she’s inclined to think that Nancy Tuberville’s original deed may still be in effect.
“I’m sorry it had to happen, but the Convention Center is built on top of the city cemetery,” James says.
As part of her research, James says, she found a reference to a court case that was heard sometime shortly before the Convention Center was built in the mid-1950s.
“They knew [about the graves] when they built the Convention Center and when they expanded it,” James says. “It’s not like they were innocent.”
DeHoff says she made no effort to locate any old court cases, then referred questions about the deeds back to Boyd. Dennis says the way the city “goes in circles” is becoming annoying and the project, meanwhile, is making her the target of jokes among her relatives.
“I’ll be danged if I ever go on another search in all my life,” Dennis says. “Sometimes I can justify my reasonings and other times I’m like, God, I must be on drugs.”
Although Dennis has informally consulted with a lawyer about the case, she says she would rather not deal with the hassle of filing a lawsuit. She also doesn’t want to have the Convention Center torn down. She just wants the city to give her an answer that makes sense.
“If you did move my people, just tell me where they’re at, and then let’s talk about the eighth of an acre,” she says. “What’s right is right.”
In the event that the city gave her the land back, Dennis says she’s not sure she wants to follow in her ancestors’ footsteps.
“I haven’t bought a burial plot,” she says, “but I told my husband maybe we should just get cremated.”
