Activity at Cedar Hill Cemetery now is expected to bring more resting in peace later.

The city is expanding its cemetery off Sky Farm Avenue, the largest in the region, by about 10 percent, assistant public works director Walter Bliss said Wednesday, and will add burial spaces that should see the city through the next 25 to 30 years. Additionally, using city workers and equipment is expected to save 90 percent of original cost estimates, he said.

“This is something that means a future board (of elected officials) won’t have to worry about running out of space here,” Bliss said at the cemetery as a public works employee on a backhoe graded and leveled dirt softened and gouged by recent rains. “For the last 10 to 12 years, there have been some concerns about this.”

The expansion, covering 10 to 12 acres, eventually will create thousands of new gravesites – too many to estimate, Bliss said – but the first 60-by-600-foot section is level, grassy and nearly ready for dividing into lots for sale. Sexton Venable Moore Jr. will complete the layout of gravesites.

“It’s a work in progress,” Bliss said.

The expansion covers land at the northwest corner of the cemetery section, west of Lovers Lane. In 1999 the city bought 26 acres from T.J. Jemerson, former owner of A. J. Martin Marble Works, said Anna Booth in the strategic planning department. Only part of that land is being developed now.

“We had an engineering firm take a look at it at the time,” Bliss said, “and they told us it would cost a million-plus to do. Doing it a little at a time will take just a little more than $100,000.”

City workers had been away from the site for the last three weeks before Wednesday, returning after recent rains washed dirt from cleared areas and created a hazard for vehicles traveling along the western boundary. Previously they had moved dirt from back hillsides and started filling in what was once a 40-foot hole at the site.

Bliss has also used the weather to his advantage. Early in the project he had a weir, or embankment, built within the ravine to trap dirt washed from the hill by rain and help fill the hole.

Bliss said no historic relics have turned up or been destroyed during the expansion, though a few Civil War-era minie balls have been found. He said he has heard a cave where Vicksburg residents found shelter during the Civil War is behind another part of the cemetery, but, “Considering the rattlesnakes that could be in that field, I haven’t gone back there to check it out.”

Moore said the new area of the cemetery will not be available for burials for several months, possibly longer. “I want the original part of the cemetery to be filled before we start selling these plots.”

Cedar Hill Cemetery was created in 1837. In part due to its age, no accurate figures exist on how many people are buried there, Booth said. Some burial records were lost during periods of management transition in the 1930s and ’40s, and other records were lost to vandalism or fire in the 1970s, she said. Current city interment records, which include tombstone studies from earlier periods, show 11,512 graves.