Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Stories From The Cemeteries - Columbia County Cemeteries

 
The Morning Press, June 1979

"They're gone, but not forgotten. To most of us, the cemetery is a place we spend a lifetime avoiding. If we talk of death and burial, it's in terms of jokes. Tell your friends you're writing article about a cemetery and they'll probably say, something like, "Oh, a grave matter," or "Dead subject, isn't it? Ha Ha." But for some, a cemetery is a fascinating encyclopedia of who once was who, a place to browse and reflect on history, a nice place to visit on a sunny day, a place to preserve. Before microfilm recorded all our births and deaths and systematically preserved records in a centralized and secure place, the cemetery served as the place that listed publicly, carved in stone, our comings and goings. Before that, the way of burying people was more personal and fragmented.

There were family cemeteries for people who preferred to be buried only with their kin, on their own turf. There were church cemeteries where the faithful could be assembled after death with coreligionists near their place of worship. We seem to seek a permanent spot with a stone to announce our name and dates. But permanence, when it comes to a final resting place, is sometimes not as lasting as one thinks it could be. The early cemetery which was on the site of the present Bloomsburg Middle School wound up being all by itself, because School wound up being moved further up the hill to what is now Old Rosemont Cemetery when the school was built in the 1920s. And even though the burial place was thoughtfully selected, the stone inscribed and installed with care, there are cemeteries which are left with no survivors to care for them. 

This is the plight of the Old German Lutheran Cemetery in Danville, just off Wall Street near the Danville Hospital 1 property. It is so bramble covered that it is very hard to even get in to see who's buried there. There are toppled stones, and the contrast with the well-maintained cemetery just across the street is poignant.

Although some of the graves are kept up by individuals, it is almost impossible to make one's way to those any distance from the road. From time to time, interested people in the borough have enlisted the help of such groups as the Boy Scouts for mowing and general cleanup. But sustained care wasn't envisioned as a problem when the cemetery was set up. After the cemetery's congregation disbanded, the graves of former congregants were abandoned to decay. Planning consultant Carolyn Lembeck has been asked by, the borough of Danville to see if some kind of grant couldn't be obtained to fix up and maintain the cemetery.

But it may not be possible to get a Community Development Block Grant for Historic Preservation, which at first seemed promising. That is because it will probably be necessary to prove that someone of historic importance is buried there. And important as they may have been as fathers and sons,  wives and daughters, the most historic role any of these buried ancestors played, according to the planner's research, was service in World War I: patriotic, but not necessarily historically significant with a capitol 'H.' 

Ms.Lembeck said she intends to try to at least get the cemetery listed as a historic place on a state registry. Urban open space The planner says there is a renewed national interest in historic cemeteries. But she values them not just for historic information. "A downtown cemetery is the greatest resource because it's preserving open space," she said. The planner's interest in cemeteries goes beyond the professional.

Even when she's on vacation, she says she wanders through cemeteries. Once when looking through one in Bar Harbor, Maine, she was enjoying the little bits of nautical history recorded on the gravestones of drowned sailors, when she met a town resident walking through. "I always walk to work this way, because I like to say hello to the folks," the woman said. So Danville's planner figures a cemetery can be "an alive kind of place," used almost as a park would be. Genealogists and local historians find cemeteries a good resource for tracking down ancestors, and they find that many people come to the Columbia County Historical Society for cemetery information while working on genealogies.

Until recently, though, there was no organized way to locate a grave, and no complete list of the cemeteries.  That problem was solved by Ernest Hill of Berwick, a volunteer for the Society. He recently completed a project of finding and mapping the burial sites in the county. His completed 17x23 inch map "was recently published by the Society and is. available for interested people.

Says the modest retired lumberman, "I won't swear I got every cemetery in the county." Some. people, call a cemetery by one name and others by another, he explained. Are we talking about the same place? becomes the issue then. He began his project over a year ago at the suggestion of Dr. Craig Newton, history professor at Bloomsburg State College.

He started with a map of the county, purchased for fifty cents. Then he went to the county's Veterans Affairs office for their list of cemeteries "which was a great big start." He logged those on his map after traveling to the different townships. One cemetery which the office had listed in the wrong township proved to be difficult to find. That's because some people called it Katy's Church and others called it VanDine's. It took some asking to find out that Katy was a VanDine, and that there was only one cemetery, Usually, Hill says, he. began by inquiring from people in the neighborhood such as clergymen and funeral directors who are in a position to need to know where, people are buried. In each area, "It didn't take long, pretty soon you'd find somebody that knew," he said. He found a total of 97 different cemeteries, and went to a majority of them. A lot are small and no longer in use, he said. One which he calls the VanCampen Cemetery, is a family plot which can be seen from Elby's Restaurant, he said.

However, reports of poison ivy in the area deterred him from making an actual on-site inspection. Likes to organize Hill's interest in the Historical Society is one of being generally helpful to other researchers, he said. His own family's genealogy has already been researched by someone else. He just enjoys helping to get things organized, he said. And with the Society due to move from Bloomsburg State College to the Barton House on College Hill there will be a lot to help with.

Along with the mapping project he has also been working with the lists of names which others bring in after having "walked a cemetery." "Walking a cemetery" involves listing the names and dates of the people and the relationships on the gravestones. These are then transferred by Hill onto a card file. A list, by cemetery, is also filed. The Society still doesn't have all the cemeteries catalogued, although a few people, said Hill, are working on this project. It takes considerable time because of the condition of some of the stones. Sometimes it's necessary to take a rubbing of the stone because t the naked eye can't decipher the legend on an eroded carving. Forty-nine of the 97 cemeteries on Hill's map are not yet catalogued in the Society's files. One all alone One of the most unusual cemeteries. Hill has listed is the Geiger cemetery.

This has only one grave in it. It is the burial site of Conrad Geiger, and the stone reads only, Conrad Geiger Died 1828. Local lore has it that Geiger was found hung from a roadside tree south of Catawissa on Route 487. Because of the suspicious nature of his death, he was buried right beneath the tree, rather than in a cemetery. At the time there were rigid rules about suicides being buried in hallowed ground, which  is bramble covered.

When the congregation disbanded, are now somewhat relaxed. The stone which marks his burial spot is obviously newer than the 1828 date which appears on it. While cemeteries are usually viewed as peaceful spots, revered and preserved and visited with ceremony at least once a year on Memorial Day, they have their darker side. there was no-one to maintain the cemetery, which is on Wall Street.

 One local resident, a product of parochial Catholic schools, recalls being told as a child that if a person hit a nun, when they died their guilty hand would rise from the grave. The young child was impressed when passing cemeteries with the thought, "Hmm, all these graves and no-one in here hit a nun.".

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