Upkeep of aged, rural graveyards brings its challenges

LINN COUNTY - Put me in Boulder Cemetery when I die.

Surely that demand has been heard over the century and half since the first farmers planted their lives in and around this tiny graveyard on a little hill with the wide vistas a few miles east of Central City.

Earlier this week, Boulder Cemetery in Buffalo Township couldn't have seemed much prettier when the sun was out, the temperature up and spring finally showing itself in all its green and glory.

The look, though, was a little misleading in that it obscured the challenges that have come with keeping up this cemetery and that can confront many of the 70 or so other rural cemeteries in Linn County and the countless ones throughout a state that has been losing its rural population for decades.

Ron McGovern and the three others on the elected Buffalo Township Board of Trustees have had their particular troubles with Boulder Cemetery, one of three that they take care of, because of what McGovern says have been dead, dying and lightning-hit evergreens that once helped beautify the cemetery and defend it from the wind. Of late, too, the simple, attractive front gate to the cemetery took a beating from a fallen tree.

"When the tree ended up on top of the gate, we had everybody calling us, like it was our fault," said McGovern, the clerk of the township board.

In the end, the board of trustees, which had removed 11 dead trees in the last couple of years, decided to take down the few remaining ones, some damaged by lightning, for fear the next windstorm would drop them on to the gravestones, McGovern said. Not everyone, he added, applauded that decision.

Jon Gallagher, a soil conservationist at the Linn Soil & Water Conservation District and the county's weed commissioner, says part of his job is to conduct a quick inspection of the 70 or so cemeteries in Linn County to check for noxious weeds and otherwise to note the maintenance level of the graveyards.

One of the duties of township trustees, he said, is to solve arguments between landowners over matters such as fence lines. But he says they also are in charge of maintenance in their townships, and cemeteries typically fall to the trustees to take care of.

The upkeep of rural cemeteries varies, Gallagher said. Some, he says, need better weed control, some are in need of perimeter fence repair and a few are even difficult to find.

He points to Bertram Township, where Ilene Wright has been clerk of the township board of trustees for 26 years, as one of the county's townships with the best-tended cemeteries.

Wright says the township trustees contract out the mowing and maintenance services at two cemeteries, which is work that includes taking out dead trees when the time comes. She calls herself an "active naturalist" and so she says she systematically buys two trees a year for the two cemeteries. Some of the trees are additions to the cemeteries, some replace trees that die, she said.

Gallagher says it is "not uncommon" for rural cemeteries to "start over" once trees die off and fall into decline. But, he says, the question at Boulder Cemetery was whether all the trees needed to come down right now.

In any event, he says he is available as a resource to help the Buffalo Township trustees decide what kind of trees they now might want to use to repopulate Boulder Cemetery.

"These are all local farmers, and they know a little bit of everything," Gallagher says.

Boulder Cemetery off Sawyer Road east out of Central City remains an impossible-to-miss spot of hillside beauty for those driving by. But without trees, the cemetery also stands out as a testament to thriving Iowa farming. It is surrounded on three sides by a farmer's tall, formidable, guardrail-like fence to keep his cattle away from the graves.

The Buffalo Township's Board of Trustees, McGovern said, plans to plant new trees to blunt the look of the fence. "But you can't do it in the middle of the winter," he says of the tree planting.

By way of perspective, McGovern recalls his boyhood days when he rode the bus past Boulder Cemetery to school in Central City.

"Back in the 1960s, it was surrounded by a junk yard," he says. "They kept the grass mowed, and that was about it. There was always a bunch of dead trees that needed to be taken out."

Boulder Cemetery still has an area for new graves, but McGovern says that many of the apparent open spaces are spoken for as a part of deeds that came with the original farmers who put down stakes in the township. Many of those original properties long ago changed hands, and so the deeded grave spots are just sitting there, unused.

What those first farmers were thinking is clear, too, from where they decided they wanted to be buried.

"It's a typical location for a cemetery," McGovern said. "They usually tried to put them on top of a hill opened to the rising sun."