'Sad' cemetery gets spruce-up from Libertyville teen ministry volunteers

Mike Graham thought about the little cemetery he visited once with his dad when he and other teens from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Libertyville were trying to come up with a service project for a new leadership program.

The place had left him with a feeling, a lonely and forgotten feeling, one he thought could be improved.

"No one knew about it and it was just in ruins," Mike said about the overgrown burial ground, nearly hidden in a farm field behind the Lake County sheriff's substation and Winchester House in Libertyville. "It just made me sad."

The overgrown cemetery should be their service project, 15-year-old Mike, a freshman at Libertyville High School, told his peers. Everyone was on board.

As roughly a dozen teen volunteers and a handful of adults began raking long grasses, trimming trees, cleaning out planters and planting day lilies on Saturday, Mike's group became the first to embark on a service activity for the new leadership program called Project Joseph.

The church introduced the program this fall to revitalize its ministry to teens, said parent and Libertyville resident Charlie May, who helped clean Poor Farm Cemetery on Saturday despite his daughter, Grace, being involved in a different aspect of Project Joseph. About 130 teens are participating in various service projects, which must be completed by the middle of December.

"The youth program is very strong, but once they get into high school, things drop off," May said. "We wanted some way to encourage youngsters to continue to practice their faith."

The revamped teen ministry allows high school students to truly focus on helping others, said Maddie Lombardo, a 17-year-old junior at Carmel Catholic High School in Mundelein.

"It's just such a great opportunity to serve others and do the service that I've always wanted to do but never have been able to organize or configure," she said during Saturday's three-hour cemetery spruce-up.

Volunteers were picking up where 25-year-old Libertyville native Connor Williamson and another Eagle Scout left off in 2006. Williamson and the other scout located the cemetery, installed a white picket fence around its 25-yard square perimeter and researched the names of the 18 people buried there between 1923 and 1939 - all former residents of the Lake County Poor Farm, where people with nowhere else to go could live in exchange for working in the fields.

In the eight years since Williamson finished his scouting project, alfalfa grass grew long over the unmarked graves, untrimmed trees became scraggly, planters turned to weeds. The cemetery became nearly invisible again, giving Mike and his father that sad and lonely feeling when they visited.

On Saturday, Mike said he envisions the cemetery being like any other when volunteers are finished, landscaped with nice grass and fresh plants.

"We want to get it back to being a respectful place where people are buried," volunteer group leader Terry Gatone said.