Last Friday evening we attended a geneology program at the Heritage Center in Bismarck. The speaker was well-acquainted with his subject and has spent a good deal of time and effort in pursuing his own family lineage. He spoke of the crowded cemeteries in the eastern part of the country and the tendency to start using the cremation option. He had an Italian background and has traveled back there researching some of his long-dead relatives. In that country tombs are stacked on top of the ground, maybe five deep. They cannot stay there forever because when the family’s 40 year lease on that space expires and if it is not renewed, the bones are removed to make room for another deceased person and are placed in a common ossuary to rest for eternity.
Our part of the country does not feel these pressures (or does it?). There is an old cemetery just south of us a mile or so that seems to be in the way of progress. The city wants to build a new water tower on its acreage, and they are in a fact-finding process now. Never were there many buried there, but it sits on a 40 acre piece of ground that a farmer in the 1970's decided to clear and farm over. Several of the tombstones were buried or pushed aside, but due to some misunderstanding in the terms of the lease, he never got in trouble for desecrating the site. One of the stones still visible carries the inscription, “Stranger, call this not a place of fear and gloom. To me it is a pleasant spot, it is my husband’s tomb.”
I know of another farmer some years back who in a similar vein decided the stones of a burial ground were in the way of his machines so he pushed them aside. I don’t remember many of the details, but I do remember driving by them and seeing them in disarray. It seems to me that when I am planted in the dirt I won’t want to be disturbed or have my marker moved. I want a few people to be able to find me for a generation or two. Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology carries the stories in poetic form of about 250 residents of a cemetery. They seem to have plenty to say in their rest.
