Caring group cleans up grave
sites
By AMY RITCHART
The Leaf-Chronicle, Clarksville, TN
The challenge — cleanup the junk without
killing the vinca ground cover, a signature plant in Tennessee
cemeteries. Rossview High School senior Casey Leffel, wearing a
sun hat and work gloves, arrived with others from the Sango United
Methodist youth group prepared to meet the challenge. Leffel
worked Saturday morning along a ravine running through Mount Olive
Cemetery, lifting fallen tree limbs and brush, and piling the debris for
removal. "We're taking small trees that have fallen and putting
them into this gully," he said. "It's just sad that the cemetery was
allowed to get this bad and wasn't kept up with."
Jenessa Gebers, also a Sango
United Methodist youth group member and a Rossview High student,
coordinated the volunteers. She worked her way through the brush,
Saturday morning, placing orange flags at grave sites. Though the
group was working steadily, it plans to mark every grave. And the task
was large.
Judy Gebers, the youth group supervisor,
said eventually it would be nice if someone would donate crosses for
each grave site because many areas are sunken and will have to be
dirt-filled in order to level the ground.
The cleanup day was organized by the
Mount Olive Cemetery Task Force, a group of residents who banded
together to promote the preservation of the disappearing cemetery.
Saturday was dedicated to picking up
trash and removing overgrown brush and was the first coordinated effort
to clean up graves in Mount Olive since the task force organized in
February.
Also a part of Saturday's cleanup
efforts was task force member Daniel Holmes, 70, whose two grandparents
and uncle, all from New Providence, are buried in Mount Olive.
He arrived with garden tools and a
bucket full of bleach water, ready to clear and clean graves. He
described attending a funeral at the cemetery when he was young.
"The original way in was over there," he said, pointing to what looked
like a narrow roadway through the cemetery. "I remember coming in that
way for a funeral one time."
The youth were joined by about 15 adult
volunteers, including several city officials, members of the local NAACP
and personnel from Frontier Basement Systems, which operated Bobcats and
a bark chipper, donated to the group for the day by Sunbelt Rentals.
"There's nice ground cover out there and we're going to try not to
disturb that," said Frontier's president Layne Gebers. "We're going in
and kind of doing the heavy work of what needs to get done over there."
Layne Gebers said Frontier became
involved with the project by chance when they were looking to clean up a
separate cemetery and read about the task force's efforts to save Mount
Olive in The Leaf-Chronicle.
"We had heard about this other (cemetery). It was a project we were
looking at," he said. "We'll help out before anything else grows any
further."