Volunteers clean up city cemetery (Yuma AZ)

Written by John Ellingsworth

Wednesday, 07 July 2004

Volunteers clean up city cemetery BY JACKIE LEATHERMAN May 2, 2004 A grid of sinking, cement grave markers rise from an unstable, sandy foundation. Barely legible and cracked, years of neglect have begun to topple most of the identifiers of the dead. White crosses, fallen and splintered, litter the cemetery. The scattered, sun-faded colors of artificial flowers left in glass pop bottles and plastic cups are the only assurance that someone at one time visited the graves. A water hose snakes through the sand, past a broken beer bottle, appearing to reach for the small, intermittent patches of grass that have been planted and maintained around a few headstones. In Yuma's barren cemetery, it seems like most of the dead have long been forgotten, leaving the pigeons and lizards the only visitors in sight. However, about 40 minutes past sunrise on Saturday, a small group of people gathered in the corner of the cemetery attempting to improve the cemetery's dwindling conditions. "We're not out here to disturb anybody," said Joann Baldwin, a citizen who is concerned about the cemetery. "We're out here just to make it better." Baldwin successfully organized a cemetery cleanup project which began this weekend. About 30 citizens and volunteers from local organizations and community service programs, armed with rakes in one hand and garbage bags in the other, tried for several hours to distinguish between trash and grave markers. "We have to be careful what we are moving," said Betsy Gottsponer, a concerned citizen. "(If we) go moving things, we're going to move graves. This is Yuma's history." Al Ramirez, a member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which owns a section of the cemetery, said respect for the dead inspired him to volunteer. "I would say it was in very bad shape," he said about the cemetery. "Just because it's an old cemetery, it doesn't mean you can't clean it up." New resident Darlene Younger brought her children and grandchildren to contribute to the community and to meet new people. "Hopefully, when we die they'll do the same thing for us," said her son, L'Juy. "I feel good that I could help out," said her daughter, Jalissa. "We're new here to Yuma. It feels like we're a part of Yuma now." But whatever the motivations were behind the volunteers, the garbage bags of trash and debris lining the emetery's roads that afternoon proved their progress. Picking up trash is only the beginning for the group. It also intends to repair fences, grave markers and headstones; a much more tedious task than bagging trash. Gottsponer said the cemetery conditions have improved during the last decade, but the ownership of the 100-year-old site has made current cleanup efforts difficult. Individuals own the cemetery plots, which are broken into sections owned by local organizations. The city of Yuma maintains the roadways through the cemetery and its border. Gottsponer said the group needs permission from family members to repair damaged graves sites; graves sites that are unmarked, illegible or owned by family who has relocated. She said the local historical society has tried for years to map the grave sites and document their owners, but the lack of death records from the beginning of the century hinders its progress. So the long journey has begun of searching for family members and asking them for permission to improve the sites. While that task could take months or years, the group can say that they have adopted its first grave site after its owner approached the cleanup crew on Saturday. When Jack Steiert was younger he used to water the grass on his Uncle Harry's grave, he said. Now, the grass is gone and the fence, which once encompassed his uncle's resting place, has fallen and needs to be removed. He asked the citizens group for help. They were more than happy to oblige. "Somebody had to spearhead it and start it," he said about the group's efforts. "I didn't realize these graves were owned by so many individual people." While the group can do what they can to improve the area, they can't fix the lack of one major characteristic of cemeteries: grass. They said many people associate cemeteries with lush, green grass. But in the desert, where water is limited, grass may not be an option, Gottsponer said. "This is a desert cemetery. This is meant to be a desert cemetery. This was never meant to be a green pasture," she said. The ground is too weak to support non-native grass, according to Gottsponer, resulting in the ground sinking into graves, a frequent event at the cemetery. But even if the volunteers can't transform the cemetery to a vegetation wonderland, they said they can at least pick up the trash and and work on repairing some sites. Gottsponer and Baldwin said the cemetery's first cleanup day would not be its last. "I don't foresee us ever finishing this place," Gottsponer said. "There too many unknowns that we'll never find. We won't get it all done." Although the first cleanup day didn't produce as many volunteers as Baldwin had hoped, she said she is optimistic for a higher turn out in the future. "I'm not quitting," Baldwin said. "There's desert. Then there's trash." --- Jackie Leatherman can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or 539-6852. http://yumasun.com/artman/publish/print/printer_10937.shtml

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 25 March 2008 )

 

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