Volunteers make quick work of cemetery cleanup

By: 
David Peck

An old saying goes, “Many hands make light work,” and that was certainly the case on Saturday as a couple dozen citizen volunteers gathered at the Sand Draw Cemetery east of Lovell to spruce up the grounds for a project organized by the Lovell-Kane Area Museum board of directors.

Museum board president Karen Spragg said several people asked Spragg and other board members last spring why the historic cemetery was in such bad shape and wasn’t being taken care of. Spragg reached out to county commissioner Bruce Jolley to see if ownership could be determined, and Jolley discovered that the county actually owned the property because of taxes owed decades ago.

Spragg and Jolley worked with Eric and Chadell Smith, whose family had interest in the cemetery years ago, and Spragg and the Smiths met with the commissioners in September and signed papers to transfer ownership to the museum as a donation from the county.

“This is Lovell’s first cemetery, as far as I know,” Spragg said, noting that there are names representing 19 known graves listed on the cemetery information sign. She said Annella Prosser volunteered to start researching the history of each person buried in the cemetery.

With ownership transferred, Spragg and the museum board scheduled a cleanup day for October 12 and put out the word for volunteers to clear and burn brush and weeds at the site. Spragg said 26 volunteers attended the cleanup day, and the fire department came out later to make sure the fires were totally extinguished.

Spragg said she was thrilled by the turnout Saturday.

“I thought it was amazing, absolutely amazing to have that many people show up,” she said. “They all just walked to a different corner and started cutting and raking. The next step is to clean up outside the cemetery, and we’d like to mark each grave with a line of rocks. We may do further research on whether there are graves outside the fence using ground penetrating radar that Northwest College has.”

Planned for three hours, the work was done in a little over an hour, Spragg said.

“It was a good project, and it went so fast,” she said. “The whole process went so smoothly.”

And what’s the oldest grave in the cemetery? According to Prosser, that honor appears to go to John Wesley Cook, who was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on April 6, 1838, married Henrietta Wilson in Van Buren, Missouri, on September 14, 1971, and died April 17, 1893, in the Lovell area. Born in 1852, Henrietta died in 1931 in Longmont, Colorado. The Cooks had five daughters.

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