MARK GOODMAN/Blurb Book #9. [2019] In the nineteenth century, Bastrop’s main burial ground was often referred to as the Silent City of the Dead, but officially named Fairview Cemetery, in 1884, three years after the formation of the Bastrop Ladies Cemetery Association was granted by the mayor and city council control over the unmaintained and wild graveyard; this voluntary association became the keeper of the cemetery for one hundred and sixteen years before management of Fairview reverted back to the local city government. Between 1881 and 1908, Bastrop newspaper editorials, Cemetery Association notices, and letters to the editor describe the ongoing struggle not to give up the cemetery to the thistles and weeds. During this same period, obituaries, loving tributes and remembrances, often with prayers and poems, celebrated some of the earliest and most respected founding citizens of the town; and there were also news reports of more disturbing deaths involving suicide, murder, hanging, accident and disease, told in plainer language about villains and innocents, the scorned and abandoned. This book is illustrated with black and white photographs taken in Fairview Cemetery between 1994 and 2000, miniature paintings and embellishments from a fifteenth century French handwritten illuminated manuscript, and botanical watercolors published in Paris during the early nineteenth century.