New gravestones to be placed at pioneer cemetery

More than two dozen new gravestones will be dedicated Saturday, Sept. 1, at the nearly 160-year-old St. Stephen Cemetery on the Carol Stream-Wheaton border.

The ceremony will be at 1 p.m. at the cemetery that traces its origin to the former German farm community of Gretna, north of St. Charles Road and west of Schmale Road.

Nearly 25 individuals, families and one other cemetery have contributed to the project to mark each of the 125 grave sites in the one-acre pioneer cemetery, which is maintained by the Milton Township Cemeteries Authority and its companion organization, Friends of Pioneer Cemeteries.

St. Stephen Cemetery is one of several owned by the Joliet Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

St. Michael Cemetery on South Warrenville Road, Wheaton, has given a large grant to the cemeteries authority to help with the cost and installation of the gravestones.

Each of the gravestones is antique gray and 12 inches tall and 24 inches long. Each is engraved with the person’s name, date of birth, the city and country of their origin, their relationship to others buried there, and their date of death. Each gravestone has been placed on a concrete base.

The last burial in St. Stephen was in about 1910. The St. Stephen Mission was an active place of worship for Gretna area residents for more than 37 years, or until about 1889.

This is the third year that a Family Remembrance Day program has been held at St. Stephen in early September. The first, in 2010, drew more than 250 family members and relatives of those buried in the cemetery.

Many of those early families are interrelated by marriage and include the names Dieter, Hahn, Klein, Krapf, Kriebe, Mittman, Moore, Ott, Stark, Voll and Warner.

Work to restore, refurbish and maintain three nearly abandoned pioneer cemeteries in Milton Township was started more that a dozen years ago. Six years ago, the Friends of Pioneer Cemeteries was formed to research, preserve and publish information about the cemeteries and the families buried in each.

The other two cemeteries are Jewell Grove Cemetery (1842) on Champion Forest Drive, south of Jewell Road in Wheaton, and Pleasant Hill Cemetery (1848) on Geneva Road at Coventry Drive, west of Gary Avenue, Wheaton.

Membership in Friends of Pioneer Cemeteries is open to anyone. Annual membership is $10; lifetime membership is $100. Interested persons may contact Jim Scheffler at P.O. Box 540, Wheaton, IL 60189-0540, or call (630) 668-8738.