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Forest Lawn Cemetery gets improvements to its historic structures
Photo
The stone archway, serves as the gateway to a cemetery. Rather than having tombstones, Forest Lawn has only flat grave markers. Its founders wanted the cemetery to have the feel of a park.
BOARDMAN
Rather than serve as a collection of memorials to individual people, as many cemeteries do, Forest Lawn Memorial Park is more of a memorial to the area in which it lies.
Or so says Tom Masters, president of the Forest Lawn Cemetery Board.
The park contains many historic features installed throughout the cemetery’s 80-plus years that the board is working to preserve.
One of those features is the stone archway that serves as the
Market Street entrance to the park across the street from Market Street Elementary School.
Visitors entering from Market Street pass under the large Gothic archway before entering the expanse of greenery that stretches between Market and Glenwood Avenue, where there is another entrance.
Repairs are being made to the archway’s mortar joints to keep it from crumbling.
“Hopefully, what we can get accomplished this year is almost a total restoration of the front entrance,” Masters said. “We’re trying to save that before permanent damage is done.”
That includes two chandeliers that hang from the entrance that are being restored. Later this year, Masters said the board hopes to have the stone of the cemetery’s chapel repaired.
The funds for the project, about $10,000 for the stone work and $800 for the chandelier restoration, came from a private donor whose name Masters would not divulge. Pisano Masonry and Construction LLC of Canfield is doing the stone restoration.
Preserving these features is one of Masters’s top priorities because of the quality of the craftsmanship, he said.
“It seems like this doesn’t exist today,” he said, referring to the iron, stone and wood work throughout the cemetery.
The features of the park include the Little Church of Forest Lawn, a shelter house, a stone structure of a Bible turned to the Lord’s Prayer, The Four Apostles, and a wishing well.
The archway, constructed in the early 1930s when the cemetery was founded, was designed by Monroe Walker Copper Jr.
The cemetery board also is working with Youngstown State University to get the cemetery listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the application for which will be submitted later this year.
More than 19,000 people are interred at the cemetery, including many whose names probably are familiar to Boardman residents — names such Gorant, Beeghly and Davis.
Others buried there include Academy Award nominee Elizabeth “Biff” Hartman, relatives of NFL player Steve Vallos, and two of the founders of the cemetery, Earl McBride and Dennis Peters, who were prominent community members.
“If you walk this thing, you recognize names if you’re from Boardman. It’s Boardman’s history,” he said.