Rediscovering a lost cemetery

May 18—GLEN ARBOR — When Kim Kelderhouse placed some lilacs inside a pink spray-painted rectangle marking a burial site in the former Glen Arbor Township Cemetery, Linda Dewey fought to hold back tears.

Kelderhouse, Leelanau Historical Society's executive director, put the flowers on the site Wednesday morning where ground-penetrating radar detected one of dozens of unmarked graves in the 1-acre cemetery. Only a handful still have markers, and many of the 80 or more had no obvious clues that someone's final resting place lie below ground.

Glen Arbor Township Cemetery from Scott Harmsen on Vimeo.

Just reaching the point where those discoveries were possible took a lot of work, Kelderhouse said. Finding those sites so people can honor the founders of Glen Arbor and making that history accessible to people is "a gift to the community."

"I think it's incredible, I mean it's moved along and stayed going," she said later. "So many historic projects can tend to hit roadblocks of not having, you know, manpower and people to keep it happening."

Kelderhouse told Dewey, a member of the township's cemetery restoration advisory committee, it all kept moving because of Dewey's inspiration and instigation.

But Dewey was quick to share the credit, and township Clerk Pam Laureto agreed it's taken the efforts of many to go from an overgrown lot once covered in blown-down trees that no one was sure if the township still owned.

That includes everything from the title search to figure out who owns the land, at the suggestion of local historian and Leelanau Historical Society board member Andrew White, to the heavy lifting needed to clear all that deadfall and cut a new path to the cemetery from Forest Haven Road.

Parshall Tree Service did the initial clearing, then Deering Tree Service cleaned up the downed trees, Laureto said. And surveyor Zach Baker, owner of Grand Traverse Surveying, donated his services to mark the property boundaries, then log the coordinates of each burial site.

"So I think it's only right to sort of acknowledge that we've had a lot of community support, and including from some of the vendors," Laureto said.

On Wednesday morning, WorkSmart owner Mike McGarry and company Project Manager Shaun Wendell worked to find those burial sites. They drove a utility vehicle with a ground-penetrating radar unit on front across the cemetery's southeast corner, the last spot to investigate.

McGarry asked Laureto and Dewey for seven more yellow flags to mark seven more burial sites. He placed the numbered flags at the west end of each site to mark the probable spot where a headstone once stood.

With more than 25 years' experience, it was hardly the first cemetery McGarry helped to investigate, he said. Nor was it uncommon for him to see one with so few remaining markers.

"We've been to cemeteries that only have one marker, that's the only way they knew it was a cemetery," he said.

He explained how ground-penetrating radar uses signals at three different frequencies to look for underground disturbances at different depths. Those disturbances when displayed show up as arcs, with the peak of each arc representing a burial site.

Wendell marked each one with spray paint and flags, plus a few spots that could have been a buried headstone.

Then, Baker followed behind and used a GPS tool to log each grave, data that can be used to create a detailed map, he said.

"It's been a neat project to see it all cleaned up like this," Baker said. "When I first came here it was all blow-down and you could hardly even get in here."

Next, plans call for restoring the site to a "woodland cemetery," meaning there won't be lush green lawns to mow, but there will be paths and landscaping for people to walk through without stepping on someone's grave, Laureto said.

Plans are also to place some kind of marker at each gravesite, although they won't have names on them since the burial records were lost.

"And then this will just be a serene place that people can come and pay their respects and enjoy nature," Laureto said, adding no new burials will be allowed.

Glen Arbor Township Cemetery was active from 1880 to 1927, Dewey said. In the mid-1960s the township tried to reactivate it, but the state wouldn't allow it without the missing burial records.

At one point, township officials thought those records had been transferred to the National Park Service, along with the land when the federal agency created Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Dewey said previously. Neither turned out to be the case, and a deed revealed the property would have been excluded from the lakeshore.

Researching obituaries and death records showed that 51 people were buried in the cemetery including the 13 graves that still had markers, Dewey said before Wednesday. She and others expressed surprise over how many more sites the ground-penetrating radar found.

It's still possible some burials were missed, McGarry said. For one, the trees that grew up since 1927 could be obscuring some gravesites.

And there's a mass grave toward the cemetery's west end that Laureto said will require some research to investigate why it's there — White, who came to the cemetery Wednesday, offered one theory that it was the relocated remains of people who died before 1880.

Laureto said it'll be a few years before the township completes its plan to create a woodland cemetery.

A May 26 cemetery memorial will be a chance for people to pay their respects before then, according to a release from Dewey. John Sawyer will read a eulogy for James Lawrence Green, one of the Civil War veterans buried there, and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War members will be there in period dress.

Along with taps by Norm Wheeler and a poetry reading by Anne-Marie Oomen, Glen Lake Community Schools teacher Melissa Okerlund will read a list of all known burials, and the district's eighth-graders will talk about the people buried there they studied for their local history project.

That school project is part of an effort to keep the stories of the people interred at the cemetery alive, Dewey said before.

Preserving those memories is one of the reasons McGarry likes to work in cemeteries, even with underground utilities making up the bulk of his business.

"I'm glad we're able to do this because at the end of the day that's all they got is this plot," he said of the deceased. "It's kind of sad to forget everybody."

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct a reporter's error giving the wrong last name for Glen Arbor Township Clerk Pam Laureto. May 18, 2023