Sunday, August 26, 2012
Associated Press
PORT JEFFERSON, Ohio
It all started as a journey to find the ancestors of her husband. But the journey has taken Rhonda and Rich Wade, of Port Jefferson, on a path they never expected.
“Rhonda is into genealogy,” said Rich. “We could find information on my grandfather, but we couldn’t find his dad. I had heard about a cemetery on North Lane Street in Port Jefferson, and I said, ‘Let’s go look there.’”
That was five years ago, and what they found in the Pioneer Cemetery both shocked and dismayed them.
“In 1982, the trustees got tired of mowing around the tombstones. So they dumped them all onto one gravesite,” said Rhonda. “This included the tombstone of Samuel Rice, one of the founders of Port Jefferson.”
The site where all the gravestones were dumped was overgrown with poison ivy. Through the passage of time, the gravestones had sunk into the ground, covered by the poison ivy and other materials.
“We removed the poison ivy,” Rhonda said. “It has taken five years for us to dig up all the tombstones. We kept digging until we could find no more stones.”
“I was down in the knee-deep hole, looking for the gravestones,” Rich said. “We finally decided we had gone as deep as we could.”
The gravestones were all laid out in the grass, said the couple. Now, thanks to Shane Roe, of Roe Transportation, a secure area has been created for this piece of Port Jefferson history. He prepared a soft, level pad for the gravestones to be placed on while the couple begins a restoration process on each one.
“We know we’ll never be able to put the gravestones back where the bodies are buried,” Rhonda said. “So we wanted to do something to protect them from further damage.”
Roe laid a pad of stones by the trees in the cemetery. There, each tombstone has been placed. Some are undamaged. Others are broken into pieces. And the couple know that some of the pieces may never be found.
“On Memorial Day, the area Boy Scouts helped pick up the stones and put on the pad,” Rhonda said. “They started helping us put together the puzzle pieces of each gravestone.”
Approximately 18 to 20 Scouts helped that day.
“Rhonda had contacted me to talk about doing this as an Eagle Scout project,” said Steve Baker, advancement chairman for Shelby County Boy Scouts. He coordinates Eagle Scout projects in the county.
“Because she had done a lot of the work, we decided not do to it as an Eagle Scout project, but decided it would be a great district project for the boys to help with.”
Baker said Rhonda talked to the Scouts about how the cemetery had been neglected and the history tied to the cemetery.
“The boys went into the woods and found some more of the stones,” Baker said. “They had a good sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.”
The Scouts also learned how to make foil images of the headstones.
The couple has found gravestones from 1830 in those uncovered from the mass grave of tombstones.
“We have found stones that are not in the interment records for the cemetery,” said Rhonda. “We think we’ve found one of a Civil War veteran, Silas Kemp.”
The couple are now in the process of restoring the gravestones to how they looked the day they were placed in the cemetery. Rhonda recently attended a workshop in Wapakoneta about restoring tombstones. She learned how to safely remove the years and years of dirt on the tombstones. And now she and Rich spend their evenings at the cemetery — with a generator humming in the background — as they use a drill with a plastic brush attached to clean the gravestones.
“We have matched up the pieces of the tombstones as much as we can,” said Rhonda. “We’ve put them together as families. Now it’s time to clean them up.”
As the still of the night comes out, the reflections of two people — who have no one buried in Pioneer Cemetery — are bent over the gravestones trying to restore the history of the founders of the small village of Port Jefferson.