NEWARK — Every Mother’s Day, Ann Jeffress and her two sisters have come to Woodland Cemetery here to lay a rose at the grave of their mother, Lucy. The visits were never easy, but now they have become traumatic in ways they never imagined. When the women enter the cemetery, they walk hand in hand, clutching sticks to fend off dogs or potential attackers. They poke cautiously through mounds of rubble in search of the spot where their mother was laid to rest.

A once illustrious cemetery where over 80,000 people have been buried, and with a history dating to Newark’s heyday in the 19th century, Woodland has fallen into a bleak state of disrepair. These days, the cemetery is a blight on a neighborhood striving for renewal, a magnet for crime and garbage.

Woodland’s 37 sloping acres are choked with chest-high weeds. Its gatehouse is crumbling, much of its fence is broken and many headstones have been toppled or vandalized. Lucy Jeffress struggled to raise her family on a housekeeper’s salary — now her gravestone lies cracked on the ground.

Ann Jeffress said that she had called the cemetery’s management repeatedly, but that her entreaties, like those of many other relatives of those buried there, had gone unanswered or unheeded.