By redrawing the boundaries between the Archdiocesan and city property, St Margaret's was expanded to cover 7.512 acres (3.040 ha), returning existing gravesites to Catholic-owned land without the need for re-interment.
[6] The Oakwood cemetery, owned by the City of Montgomery, opened in 1819 and covers 120 acres (49 ha), and includes a plot for soldiers of the American Civil War.
[10] The oldest part is known as the old graveyard, and is a free burial site, where there were no racial segregation rules, and many slavers are buried alongside the people that they enslaved.
[14] Also buried in Oakwood Cemetery Annex are pilots from Britain, Canada, and France who died during World War II, while training at Maxwell Air Force Base.
[17] From 1981 onwards, care of the RAF section of the cemetery was maintained by a private Birmingham company under contract to the Canadian Agency of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
[22] Hank Williams's funeral, recorded as the largest funeral in Montgomery's history and one of the largest in the entire Southern United States, had a line two and a half city blocks long between the Montgomery City Auditorium and the Oakwood Cemetery Annex, with three trucks required to handle the wreaths that were placed at the Annex, and (according to R. L. Lampley and Marvin Stanley, respectively the Fire and Assistant Police Chiefs in charge) 100 fire and police officers managing a crowd conservatively estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 people.
[23] Thousands more visited the grave in the Annex in the days to follow, with an editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser remarking that "Never in the history of this town have so many thronged to the funeral of a citizen as they did in the case of Hank Williams.
"[24] There were 200 African American mourners in the segregated seating in the Auditorium,[23] the editor of the Advertiser Joe Azbell recounting that "They came from everywhere, dressed in their Sunday best, babies in their arms, hobbling on crutches and canes, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, small children, and wrinkle faced old men and women.
[26] The Advertiser also reported the cross-racial attendance of the funeral on March 28, 1909, of Bob Goodwyn, observing that "In his death, one-armed Bob Goodwyn, the negro ferryman, achieved a something as few of his race have done — for at his grave in Oakwood Cemetery yesterday, whites and blacks mingled with little distinction; the two people mingled their voices in the 'Nearer My God to Thee'; both bowed to tender, revertant homage to one whom they hailed as a hero.
[27] On April 11, 1908, he had rescued E. W. Bliss, a ticket purchase agent for the L&N, from drowning in the Alabama River with his 16-year-old friend from the Western Railway, H. Q. Daniels who was a machinist.
[27] In response to a suggestion from reader Mrs William Knox, the Advertiser organized a collection for Goodwyn, and on May 30, 1908, he was awarded a gold medal for heroism by Montgomery mayor W. M.
[28] This included her walking tours not only of Oakwood but of other places around the city, lectures at Auburn University and Huntingdon College, and the publication of several local history books.
[28] F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled the cemetery with graves of confederate soldiers that character Sally Carrol Happer walked through in his short story "The Ice Palace" on Oakwood.