From the Richmond Enquirer, 3/6/1862, p. 3, c. 4
SHOCKING OUTRAGE. – Early Tuesday morning the Sexton of the
Holywood [Hollywood] Cemetery, discovered that a number of costly tombstones and
monuments in that beautiful “city of the dead,” had been hurled down, and
sacrilegiously destroyed, apparently in mere wantonness of malice. From the
traces of footsteps found upon the railings of an iron fence, which the worse
than vandals had climbed in order to topple over a fine shaft it enclosed – and
from other indications, it is likely that the outrage was perpetrated by a party
of five or six men, and that the objects of their grossly unfeeling and
barbarous assaults were selected at random. Some six or seven tombstones and
monuments, some of them of a very costly character, were destroyed in all. One
or two of the number were merely thrown down and escaped serious injury, but in
several instances the stones were broken even to their bottom pieces, and their
ornaments and inscriptions defaced. Among those destroyed is a handsome tomb
erected by Dr. Geo. W. Briggs to the memory of his wife, and a tomb upon a
section owned by Messrs. J. & A. Bargamin. We sincerely trust the perpetrators
of this unchristian outrage may be detected, and severely punished.
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