Sunday, August 26, 2018

On the Care and Keeping of Cemeteries

Last Wednesday, I did a post about the cemetery here in Hudson--the original Hudson City Cemetery and Cedar Park--and an initiative that could lead to the cemetery being listed in the National Register of Historic Places and maybe getting some volunteer TLC: "A Little Help from Our Friends." On Friday, a reader alerted me to a legal notice regarding another area cemetery, which appeared in the print version of the Register-Star. That notice appears below, with the list of the people named in the notice omitted.

 

The notice inspired me to go out to Mt. Pleasant Reformed Church and visit the graveyard. There I found several tombstones and monuments tied with yellow caution tape. The tape appeared to have been there for a few months, if not longer.


Seeing the tombstones tied with caution tape reminded me of a story told to me years ago by a colleague in New York. While he and his wife and their two young children were exploring an old cemetery one weekend somewhere in New England, a tombstone toppled over onto his daughter. He rushed over and lifted the stone, freeing the little girl. After it had been determined that his daughter had suffered no injury, he went back to the cemetery and tried to repeat the feat of lifting the stone. He found he couldn't budge it. 

Certainly, tombstones in danger of toppling over present a liability risk, but, whether it's done by descendants or cemetery management, can tombstones and monuments marking people's graves really just be removed?
COPYRIGHT 2018 CAROLE OSTERINK

2 comments:

  1. That cemetery seems to be very well kept. Maybe strict policies such as these are the reason. I didn’t think any of the stones, including those marked with caution tape, looked bad enough to remove, certainly.

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  2. A few years ago, my grandson, Daniel Jersey, participated in a Boy Scout project to straighten and repair tombstones in a cemetery near Sterling, Mass. It was a transformation!

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