Grave matters: Maintaining history in Dundee Township

"Show me the first graveyards of the country and I will tell you the true character of its people."

When Benjamin Franklin spoke those words, not only was he talking about people buried in them, but the people left to maintain the memories of the lives they hold.

With time, keeping the legacies alive and the grass mowed become a bigger challenge. Caregivers fight the weather, vandals and misplaced burial records when researching the interred. If they are lucky, they find enough information to argue we should care who's buried beneath the crumbling headstones.

Dundee Township Cemetery West, along Route 31, is a good example. It's old, and it's filled to the point of being closed to new plots.

From the time of its first burial in 1840 to the last internment three years ago, more than 8,000 reasons, or people, exist why the challenge should continue to be met to remember its prominence.

"There's a lot of history in the cemetery," said Marge Edwards president of the Dundee Township Historical Society. "If you walk among the graves you will see the names of people who built up this area."

Haeger, Carpenter, and Roehl are a few. Edwards, and Estes are others.

In between the prominent, though, are names of lesser-known people who have lived and died in wars or whose lives were claimed by minor maladies that were deadly at the time.

Every two years, the historical society hosts a cemetery walk to bring the people and their stories back to life. Collecting information for the people to highlight is not easy or quick, said Edwards.

She is currently researching names for an Oct. 16 cemetery walk the Dundee Historical society will sponsor.

"Oh, it takes months," she said. "We start with obituaries and then read the documents we can get our hands on."

They can't depend on the headstones. The wind, rain, snow and heat of more than a century have smoothed over some of the names, making them illegible.

Sometimes society members reach a brick wall and cannot solve the mystery of why the person should be remembered. Also, at times, they cannot collect enough information about them. Eventually, they go on to the next person on their list.

The 9-acre west cemetery started as a private family burial place. It was owned by Alfred Edwards and began when he buried his 2-year-old daughter, Olivia. Years later, he donated a portion of it to Dundee Township.

It was expanded and served as the township's only cemetery for decades.

"Everything was done on paper then," said Township Supervisor Sue Harney. "In a way, that was good because people didn't have to worry about computer crashes and losing documents"

In another way, it was bad because not all the paperwork that held the sale of plots or location of graves is within reach. Over time, some documents have been lost.

So, veterans like Sal Neri must put an extra effort into finding who is buried in the West Dundee graveyard.

Neri is a member of Carpentersville's American Legion Post 679. Every Memorial Day members put hundreds of American flags on veterans' graves, some dating from the Civil War and the Black Hawk War.

"We work hard to make sure every veteran has a small American Flag on his or her grave. Some of the markers are hard to read, so we look at graves around it and see if there is a wife, brother, son or daughter buried nearby. Then, we work from there," Neri said. "In the end, we hope we include all the veterans."

The cemetery being closed to new burials is one advantage. Neri and his comrades do not have to worry about researching new names. They work with the graves already there. However not all markers reflect military service, he said.

"That makes it hard for us. We want to honor all the veterans with a flag," he said.

Dundee Township officials want to go further and honor all the people buried in the cemetery, Harney said. Many times that entails giving perpetual care by mowing the lawn, trimming the grass around the grave markers and propping up the headstones that have broken or fallen.

"It's a challenge because old cemeteries don't pay for themselves. We don't collect any more money on new burials, yet we spend thousands of dollars a year on salaries of employees who mow the lawn and trim the weeds." Harney said. "It's the perpetual care that comes along with the plot."

"We don't have the money to repair the broken headstones," she said. "In many cases, no family members are around to repair them."

Rarely will fresh flowers be placed on the graves. Many of the descendants of the interred are long gone. They have died, or they have moved and they don't know their great-grandparents are buried in a little old cemetery in West Dundee, Illinois.

Cemetery workers Mark Rakow and Anthony Mao are the closest thing to kin for many of the people in the graveyard.

Once a week they mow the lawn, and every two weeks they trim the tall grass around the headstones.

"It takes two people an entire day to trim around the headstones," Rakow said. "This isn't like other cemeteries where many of the stones are flush with the ground, and we can ride through it with our mowers."

No one is complaining, through. Owning a cemetery takes on a tremendous public trust, Harney said. Whether that trust comes from caring for a graveyard that is closed to new burials, like the one in West Dundee, or caring for one that still has space for burials like Dundee Township Cemetery East, another township-owned graveyard in East Dundee, the ground is still hallow. It holds the remains of the well-known and the anonymous.

They are not just forgotten dead people whose names are remembered on weatherworn slabs of concrete or granite.