Thursday, July 17, 2014
YOUNGSTOWN
A cemetery beyond a century old is building a new experience for its future clients who choose cremation.
A calm, serene and peaceful $700,000 memorial and columbarium garden for cremated remains is under construction at Tod Homestead Cemetery on Belmont Avenue and expected to be complete by October.
“We could do this [cemetery business] for a long time without doing this, but we also wanted to be useful to the people of Youngstown,” said Sallie Tod Dutton, president of The Tod Homestead Cemetery Association. “We want to stay with the trends.”
That trend is cremation — an alternative to burial that has been on the rise for decades with 3.56 percent of deaths cremated in 1960 and 43.2 percent by 2012. The projected percentage of cremation rate is 48.8 percent by 2017, according to the Cremation Association of America.
For the past five to six years, the Tod Homestead Cemetery Association has talked about the need to create something outside of mausoleums and traditional burial for cremated remains. The cemetery averages 40 cremations a year and 300 burials.
Read more about the project in Friday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.