Rose Hill Cemetery volunteers have been working this summer on surveying the oldest part of the grounds as part of a preservation project to ensure the memory of over 1,600 people buried there.
The oldest section of the Cemetery, on the west side of Bloomington, is home to many notable individuals. These include war veterans, Indiana University’s first president Andrew Wylie, and former state governor Paris Dunning, who promoted free common schools and equal educational opportunities for women. And those whose names can now be found on buildings and street signs in town, like Buskirk and Rogers, can also be found in this section of the cemetery, cemetery volunteer Douglas Rife said.
He likened a cemetery to an open-air museum.
“There's thousands of stories in this graveyard, and you can also see the sweep of history, not only intellectual history, but American history here, too, and you can see art and architecture in this section as well as the rest of the cemetery,” he said.
The oldest section was named the Spencer Edition, he said. It was established as a graveyard in 1819 by Monroe County. Records weren’t kept of those who were buried until 1892 when the Ladies Cemetery Association started to manage the cemetery and named it Rose Hill.
“Unlike the rest of the cemetery, where they have plots and they know who's in every plot, and the ladies kept records of who was buried and when they were buried, and in a lot of cases what they died from. That wasn't the case here. People just buried their dead and put up a stone or not and just wasn't recorded,” Rife said.
Operations coordinator and administrator Amy Leyenbeck said for about the last 10 years, the cemetery has had funds for preserving deteriorating or unsafe headstones. The Prospect Hill Neighborhood Association has helped by requesting grants.
“A couple years ago, we started talking about the idea for going through the entire older section and documenting every headstone and talking about you know what does it need, taking pictures and then creating a system so that we could look at you know ranking by number so that we can actually create a plan of which ones are most in need today, and then we can prioritize our funds,” Leyenbeck said.
The city designed a survey tool for uploading photos of headstones and collecting information.
Each person in the oldest section has an ID connected to a photograph the volunteers take of the gravestone, Rife said. Then the volunteers note the name on the gravestone, if it’s shared with anybody else, if a person has more than one gravestone, and then they rate the condition of the gravestone.
Rife said they take note of the gravestone in two different ways. First is the structure of the stone, for example, if it’s in danger of toppling. Then they rate the surface of the gravestone, for example, if it’s covered in lichens, if it’s readable or if there are breaks cutting through the inscription.
The survey was completed last week. Next, the data will be reviewed and edited before the creation of a comprehensive plan.
“We'll have a list of these are the ones that we need to start with, and then here's kind of a middle section we can get to later, and then next year, in with our grant funds and our funds from our regular budget, we can start having our restorationists work on those stones,” Leyenbeck said of the ongoing project.
“I really love being partly responsible for caring for this place and the people that are here. And if we don't preserve the stones, they do fall apart, and then they won't be legible, and no one will know who was buried there,” Leyenbeck said. “So, it's important that we preserve that, so that people long time from now can come and see their ancestors that are buried here and learn about our history.”
