Sabine Pass ISD students honor forgotten graves with headstone restoration project
Published 5:08 pm Friday, May 23, 2025
Eduardo Galvan, Junior, aides Sam Parfait, maintenance worker, in placing the new headstone at Pace Cemetary in Sabine Pass. (Cesar Cardenas/The News)
The new Headstones where heavy enough to withstand storms for the next couple decades and need heavy machinery to be moved into place. (Cesar Cardenas/The News)
Anthony Garcia poses for a picture as he works video editing. (Courtesy Photo)
Rudy Vega works on a computer tracking the progress of the project. (Courtesy Photo)
A view of one of the old headstones that is being replaced. (Cesar Cardenas/The News)
Jason Becerra edits video of the project as part of the class. (Courtesy Photo)
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Sabine Pass ISD students gathered at the Pace Cemetery Wednesday morning to see an end to a year-long project of restoring old and forgotten graves that have been damaged by storms and hurricanes for the past several years.
“The first time I came out here, I was just kind of appalled with the conditions of some of the cemeteries,” said Scott Hagedorn, teacher at Sabine Pass High School and organizer for the Headstone Restoration Project. “Some of the headstones had been washed away, there were plots with just rocks, and you couldn’t figure out who exactly was buried where. So we started a community project, pulling up records from the early 1900s to figure out who was buried here and to give those people their names back.”
This is the second time that this project has been done with the first being in 2020 right before the start of the pandemic. Only one grave was able to be replaced at that time. This year the class have designed and constructed seven new headstones for those who have been forgotten.
The project was a collaborative effort between students to research and design these headstones using old archives, newspapers and websites to match whose old tombstone was located. Some students were fortunate enough to find old pictures of the graves to replicate what they used to look like.
The project stems out of the 21st Century Communication class that seeks to teach students about modern communication methods and skills such as podcasting, photoshop skills and video editing along with traditional forms of communication. As part of the project students also created videos to archive their progress throughout.
“One of the students found records of a 16-year-old boy who drowned while fishing in 1944,” said Hagedorn. “They found his school records, newspaper clippings, even his father’s information. It turned into this deeply personal story from a name that had almost been lost.”
The cemetery is currently cared for by the community and the new headstones are up for the community to view at the Pace Cemetery in Sabine Pass.
