Debate over historical importance stops construction next to Robins Cemetery

CEDAR RAPIDS — Only one-half acre in size, the Robins Cemetery on the border of Cedar Rapids and Robins seems under siege from a pack of new homes closing in around it.

For now, the cemetery with headstones dating to the 1860s is getting a rest from the building onslaught as the state and city testily debate its historic significance.

Much of the homebuilding around the cemetery in the Knollwood Park development on the east side of Council Street NE is being supported by federal disaster dollars that have arrived in Cedar Rapids to replace housing lost in the 2008 flood.

The federal money comes with strings, which include the need to satisfy environmental, historical and archaeological reviews.

For now, the State Historic Preservation Office has put a hold on construction of the next 29 homes in the development as the state and the city discuss more thoroughly if the building will have an adverse impact on the cemetery and on history.

The city's historic consultant, The Louis Berger Group, has concluded that the cemetery lacks historic significance.

Paula Mitchell, the city's housing and redevelopment manager, said the consultant has said that cemeteries in and of themselves are not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. They must derive historic status in one of four ways: from the graves of people of 'transcendent' importance; from age; from distinctive design features; or from association with historic events.

Dan Higginbottom, an archaeologist with SHPO, rejected the consultant's conclusion that the Robins Cemetery is not a historic property.

'Given the proximity, it is our consulting opinion that the proposed development would significantly alter (the cemetery's) rural setting and introduce jarring and anachronistic visual intrusions upon the local landscape,' he said.

A few houses already have been built directly to the east, and the state archaeologist said additional homes 'would only compound and intensify' the impact.

Mitchell said SHPO and city officials may end up 'agreeing to disagree' on the historic status and instead try to agree that the development won't negatively impact the cemetery.

Kyle Skogman, president of Skogman Homes, said his company's construction arm, Premiere Developers Inc., is building 14 of the 29 homes.

'It's starting to cause some problems,' Skogman said. 'We were planning on getting started. And there are buyers for the homes, and they're anxious, too. So it's causing some discomfort.'

The Robins Cemetery, which in earlier days was known as the Horn-Mentzer Cemetery and which moved into Robins in about 1938, sits on a grassy knob that remains in Robins even though the homes around it are in Cedar Rapids.

Marilyn Cook, the former Robins city clerk and its current finance coordinator, said the city put up a new fence around the cemetery in the last few years exactly in the spot where an old farm fence had separated the cemetery from what had been farm fields. For that reason, she doubted there were any unmarked burial sites beyond the fence.

At the same time, Lori Pickart, Robins current city clerk, said the city hired a contractor — Bob Terry of Terry and Sons Cemetery Restoration and Mapping of Liscomb — in the last few years to map it after some older residents said they believed unmarked graves existed in the cemetery.

A Terry company report in 2014 counted about 50 marked graves and another 16 unmarked graves. The city since has placed stone markers, which state 'Unknown' on them, at each of the previously unmarked graves.

Bob Terry said Thursday he is a dowser who has helped find drowning victims, missing people and unmarked graves.

'I have, I think, a connection with the soul,' Terry said. 'Because sometimes I'm in the middle of a cemetery, and my rods will point to a direction, and I follow them 20, 30, 50 feet and there will be a body there. So somebody is calling me to come (and saying), 'Please don't miss me.''

Terry said he knows dowsing is viewed skeptically by many. But he said he can find buried bodies as good as ground imaging equipment.

He said it would not be surprising to find unmarked graves outside the boundaries of a cemetery as old as this one.

'Who knows 100 years ago if there wasn't a potter's field or people buried there outside the boundaries that are out there now,' Terry said.