'You can still honor them:' Lansing volunteers restore, preserve grave sites

LANSING — A group of graves sat nearly forgotten and barely marked in a grassy field at Mt. Hope Cemetery for nearly a century.

Thanks to the efforts of a local group of historians in 2019, a fitting memorial now remembers the lives of 61 children who died at the Boys Training School in Lansing between 1860 and 1933.

“It means a lot that we still care for our loved ones even after they’re gone,” said Nancy Mahlow, of Lansing, who helped raise awareness about the poorly marked training school graves.

The Friends of Lansing’s Historic Cemeteries' efforts, which have included restoration of numerous other grave markers, highlight Lansing's history in a tangible way and strive to keep those sacred places within visitors' views and people's thoughts.

The training school memorial site was upgraded and expanded in 2019 with the help and fundraising efforts of the Friends, led by founder and President Loretta Stanaway.

“I think that each person wants to have some kind of a legacy,” Stanaway said. “We have restored their identity and we have given them a legacy. And their names are now available to be remembered so that there's evidence that they lived, they died and they're here.”

The group, which has restored graves and advocated for cemetery funding since 2007, now plans to clean and restore two graves in Mt. Hope's Jewish section, part of the group's ongoing efforts to draw attention to the city's three cemeteries and the history they represent.

'The city was neglecting the cemeteries'

Before forming Friends of Lansing's Historic Cemeteries in 2007, Stanaway was familiar with the cemetery field through her business, Memorial Minders, a service she started in 2000 to care for graves for clients.

She formed Friends “in response to the city’s failure” to properly maintain its three cemeteries: Evergreen, North and Mt. Hope.

“The city was neglecting the cemeteries at a level that was just shameful,” Stanaway said, citing a lack of grass mowing, weed removal and general upkeep.

In the years since, the group has taken on the tasks of cleaning memorials, hosting events and staffing the Cemetery Courtesy Office, where residents can ask cemetery-related questions. Friends has about 30 members and often draws more than a hundred attendees to their events.

The organization also hosts an annual 5K fundraiser run and, with the funds raised, has restored more than 120 monuments in Mt. Hope cemetery since 2013.

While the group has helped spearhead numerous efforts, a few large projects stand out in scale; one is the memorial for the Boys Training School.

'They're still here, and you can still honor them'

Before Friends took on the effort to remember the children who died at the former boys school, only two features were present: a stone listing the names of some of the children who died and a single headstone honoring Richard McKimmy, a boy who died on Christmas Day 1926. McKimmy’s family paid for their own marker following his death.

After raising awareness for the project, Friends of Lansing’s Historic Cemeteries raised $21,000 to install 60 more individual markers in the summer of 2019 that identify each child. Since then, they’ve continued to landscape the area, installing a bench and a flowering dogwood tree. The city of Lansing has also provided several flower beds and other trees.

“These children — before this project — had no legacy. This was a bare, grass field,” Stanaway said. “You could have walked this field for 50 years and not known there was a body, let alone 61 bodies, buried here.”

The children who died were between the ages of 11 and 17, and often succumbed to illnesses at the Boys Training School, which was a facility where sick, poor or lawbreaking youths were sent until adulthood. The school closed in 1972.

Mahlow said she became aware of the paltry recognition for the children from a news report detailing the “spooky” nature of that section of the cemetery. She became passionate about the project, feeling sympathy for the boys and their families.

“Nobody should be buried without some kind of identification,” Mahlow said. “That's your last bit of being on this earth and there should be identification.”

Mahlow said she was further inspired to take on the effort following the deaths of her mother and husband.

“Some people think their spirit is gone — they're gone. Well, yeah, in a sense, they are — but they're not. They're still here, and you can still honor them,” Mahlow said.

After obtaining records about the school following a judge’s order to unseal them, Stanaway and Mahlow were able to identify the birth and death dates for each of the boys.

Mahlow felt a connection to the boys after her long hours spent studying their records.

“It was very emotional for me,” she said. “It was like these boys became a part of my life for a long time.”

For two years, Mahlow went to the Library of Michigan during her lunch breaks to review the history of the school and its students.

“When you work on something like that, they become a part of you,” she said.

On June 17, the Friends will host an event to clean the markers and make sure they remain in good condition.

'Everybody's life mattered at some point'

While Mahlow’s work in the cemetery has remained focused on the school and its markers, Stanaway has continued pursuing other restoration efforts in the cemetery.

On July 14, Stanaway and others will take on a new project: restoring two overturned headstones in the cemetery’s Jewish section.

Stanaway said the two markers have been lying down as long as she has been working in the cemetery. Layers of dirt and grass cover the stones, leaving them mostly unreadable.

Both stones belong to members of the Beck family, a Jewish family that took on many roles throughout the years.

Some known Beck family graves include Samuel Beck, who started a clothing business in 1864; his son, Louis Beck, who ran the company after Samuel’s death; and Louis’s brother, Joseph Beck, who ran the municipal park and cemetery board until his death.

Beck family members were first buried in the cemetery soon after it opened in 1874. The family's graves rest in Section T, which is owned by the Shaarey Zedek congregation and holds the memorials of about 15 other families.

Stanaway said they have yet to identify which members of the Beck family to which the downed stones belong.

In July, Stanaway and Andrew Noland, a friend and partner of Stanaway, will unearth the two stones, clean them and assess next steps. Stanaway plans to research the individuals and determine if they have any living relatives who would be able to give permission to conduct a restoration.

If the group obtains permission, more significant restoration work will be undertaken by Noland, founder of headstone restoration company Silent Cities. He will install a new foundation so the stones can be stood up. If there are pieces broken off, Noland will construct a frame to set them back into place, reattach the pieces and fill in any gaps with an adhesive.

Noland, who met Stanaway at a Historical Society of Michigan event on cleaning and preserving headstones, originally is from Lansing and has been restoring grave markers for about four years.

“Respect for family history — mine, yours, everyone’s — is what goes into my work to honor those that came before us,” his website states.

Noland became interested in genealogy in the late 1990s, which led him to visit a cemetery to pay respects to one of his ancestors. Instead found the site lost to time, overgrown with trees and weeds.

Noland said finding out more about our ancestors is a tradition that’s quickly being lost to time — and one he hopes to support with his work.

“That's why it means so much to keep these stones intact so that nobody's forgotten,” he said. “Everybody's life mattered at some point, and it's trying to preserve that history.”

Friends plan events to raise awareness

Stanaway and her group will host several other events this year.

Saturday, the Friends of Lansing’s Historic Cemeteries will take part in a wreath presentation at "Little Arlington" in the Evergreen Cemetery.

The group will host a picnic in the Mt. Hope Fratcher Memorial Garden July 16, and a service of remembrance in the same location Aug. 27.

The group's annual cemetery walking tour — themed around "Philanthropists, Parks and Places” — is Sept. 24 and their Race to Restore 5K Run/Walk is Oct. 21.

Contact Sheldon Krause at skrause@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @sheldonjkrause.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: 'You can still honor them:' Lansing volunteers restore, preserve grave sites