Jan 17

2025 Recap

2025 was an eventful year. We received our first monetary donation in October 2024, and received even more this year.

Monetary Donations

    • 2024 October, $1,000 (Anonymous Donor 1)
    • 2024 October, $100 (Anonymous Donor 2)
    • 2025 July, $300 (Anonymous Donor 1)
    • 2025 October, $1,000 (Anonymous Donor 1)
    • Interest, $0.61
    • Total monetary income: $2,400.61

In-Kind Donations

    • Volunteer labor, ~26 man hours
    • Concrete pad
    • Mower

 

In April my wife and I mowed, and then my brother and I mowed throughout the summer. There was not much mowing to do in the autumn due to the prolonged drought.

In September, we received the donation of a second lawnmower, which means that we have two mowers to leave at the cemetery, so that I no longer have to fold my mower in half and stuff in a car to haul it down.

Finally, in November we purchased a shed kit to store the mowers in using part of the generous donations we have received. Our cousin Donald from Poynter Concrete Products in Phillipsburg donated a concrete pad and delivered it via crane truck. 

Josh, Stephen, and I assembled most of it Saturday, and then Josh and Stephen went back on Sunday and finished it up. 

While I was there on Saturday I planted an entire bed of flower bulbs, so that there will hopefully always be fresh flowers for the graves between March and July.  

Aug 24

Mowing Schedule 2025

We are working on lining out the tentative mowing schedule for next year.

We don’t mind the mowing–my brother described it as kind of a pilgrimage, and I see it as a way to honor our ancestors and to love our neighbors.

However, we live two and a half to three hours away, and mowing means a 5 to 6 hour round-trip commute and 1-2 man hours of mowing, so it’s a pretty full day.

If you are available to help with the mowing let me know which month you would like to mow and we will take ourselves off of the schedule for that month:

  • April 26 – Dan & Josh
  • May 24 – Dan & Josh
  • June 21 – Dan & Josh
  • July 19 – Dan & Josh
  • August 16 – Dan & Josh
  • September 13 – Dan & Josh
  • October 11* – Dan & Josh

*optional mow, depending on weather

You will want to load the thinnest string available for your weedeater–some of the stones are concrete and sometimes brittle. You do not necessarily need to mow on the dates listed (all Saturdays), but those are the dates we have listed because it takes us a Saturday to drive to Corkery, mow, and return home.

Note: we have been asked by the campground owner to start mowing no earlier than 9am.

Aug 24

Update August 2024

Back in May my brother and I went down and started work to install a new gate post, and then he went back in June and finished it up.

Two weeks ago we went down to do the monthly mowing. The grass was thick, wet, and tall, and the bugs swarmed our eyes as we mowed.

 

We will go down for the last mow of the year probably late September

Apr 15

Update April 2024

Apologies for the shameful two-year gap in updates. Not much new to mention, though; we go down and do monthly maintenance pretty much every month from March or April to October every year.

This month we went down and mowed the cemetery and sprayed the tombstones that had prominent mold/algae on them.

Jan 29

Update January 2022

No new updates, but we’ll be heading down in March to pick up any fallen limbs and do the first mow of the year. We typically mow/weedeat once a month from March to October.

Sep 02

Update: September 2021

It’s been quite some time since I last posted an update. There isn’t really much that’s new; most of maintaining the cemetery is just keeping up on the mowing.

And one of the guys at my job retired in July, so I have had to pick up an on-call rotation every other week, which severely limits my availability to get down to the cemetery.

My brother has been doing all of the mowing this year, except for maybe once in the spring when I was able to join him. So if you showed up at the cemetery and it looked like it had been mowed, that was quite likely my brother that deserves the thanks.

I do plan going down to the cemetery next month to mow and trim branches. regardless of my work obligations, I do have cemetery management software now and I could be catching up on that, so I’ve got no excuse.

Jul 02

Update: July 2020

My brother and I went down early last month and mowed and trimmed, and I will be heading down this weekend for the same. It’s been 4-5 weeks, so unless someone else has gone down to mow, I expect it will be a jungle.

Other than that, nothing new. If you know someone in the area with a decent drone that would be interested   in taking aerial pix of the cemetery, please let me know.

Apr 22

Update: April 2020

My brother and I both recently stopped at the cemetery separate weekends to check on the cemetery.

He noticed that it looked like someone straightened up the north fence. We are going down this coming weekend to do the regular mowing.

I have finally purchased cemetery management software (Cemeteriat) that integrates into WordPress (the CMS that runs this site). I have started adding people/graves, and they will appear under the Headstones header above. I only have the first 7 graves added so far; it’s rather time consuming.

There is a coffee can at the gate with contact info in it; if you are the one(s) that have been helping with the maintenance, we’d love to hear from you and maybe coordinate maintenance schedules.

 

Nov 09

Maintenance Update: November 2019

This year was just a lot of general maintenance–mowing, weedeating, chainsawing, hauling out brush. We are still trying to find a solution to keep the weeds down next to the headstones (and that won’t be harmful since we are just 100 feet uphill from a river).


Next spring we have some more work to do propping up and repairing headstones, and pretty soon we will have to figure out how much of the big tree to cut out–it is partially rot/split, and we’d like to keep the tree, but we will probably need to cut out part of it to save the rest.

Oct 05

Maintenance Update 2019/10/05

Nothing going on except regular mowing. We will be going down next week to hopefully do the last mow of the season, when we will find out if the salt water helped kill the weeds next to the headstones.