‘We’re not losing history.’ How Bellefonte volunteers are coming together to preserve Union Cemetery
Months after those involved in the upkeep and preservation of Union Cemetery put out a plea for new volunteers, residents are beginning to come together to help restore and preserve the history-rich cemetery.
Renea Nichols, a Bellefonte resident and Union Cemetery volunteer, noticed in the fall that the East Howard Street cemetery that she often walked through wasn’t as pristine and clean as it had been before. After asking around and posting about it on Facebook, she learned that help with the mowing and trimming had ceased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She became involved with the cemetery association and quickly went to work to help gather more volunteers.
“I always say, if you’re going to walk through the cemetery, walk through with a weed-eater,” Nichols said.
Nichols spends a lot of time cleaning headstones throughout the cemetery, including a number of veterans’ headstones. Though the upkeep of the headstone is the responsibility of the deceased’s family, sometimes they aren’t around or aren’t able to do it.
To clean headstones, Nichols usually just uses water and a sponge.
“I just use water and scrub and scrub,” Nichols said. Sometimes she’ll use D/2 Biological Solution, which is the industry standard for gravestone cleaning. That will eat away at the bacteria on the stone but it won’t damage the stone itself.
Nichols said she cleans an average of nine to 10 stones a day.
The Bellefonte Cemetery Association Volunteers recently held a headstone cleaning workshop, where about 25 people showed up to learn how to properly clean a headstone and then were put to work.
“It’s a great way for people to get involved if they don’t want to, like, mow grass or weed. They can come over and clean,” she said. “A lot of people who came to the training said, ‘Oh, my mother is buried in Milesburg, so I will go over there and clean their stuff.’ That’s fine, we just want the stones to be cleaned properly.”
Board members of the cemetery and other volunteers said that while there are more volunteers and people overseeing the total cemetery operation, there’s still never enough help. More people are needed to do clean up work around the cemetery.
Digitizing history
Restoration and preservation efforts are important to keeping local history alive, Jim Baldwin said. Baldwin has been on the cemetery board for 25-30 years, managing the cemetery and its records.
Lisa Carey is a new volunteer and works with technology and administration for the cemetery. She estimates she has about eight to 10 new volunteers just on her team.
Baldwin has a map of the cemetery that takes up 22 large papers. It was reproduced in the 1960s and at this point, it’s held together with tape. Years ago, he started a spreadsheet with the plots in the cemetery, who is buried where, and other information as it is available, including date of birth and death.
“Everything’s been on paper, like a lot of cemeteries. As time goes, those things start deteriorating. So, one of the things I thought was, let’s get copies of all this stuff up in the web and on CDs so the library can have it and all sorts of stuff. So we’re not losing history,” Carey said.
The next step Carey hopes to accomplish is to digitize the spreadsheet and map, and create a Google Map of plots that can show information about the person buried there. But that’s not something that will happen quickly or overnight; it’s taken about four months to do one just one small area of the cemetery, she said.
The Union Cemetery is the final resting place for many of Centre County’s pioneers, some former Pennsylvania governors, and a number of veterans, including Private George Harris, who was presented with the Medal of Honor in 1864.
“Not every town has that, that’s a big deal,” Carey said.
Baldwin added: “The best part about that, he was in the Civil War and he’s buried in the Soldier’s Circle of Civil War veterans.”
Private George Harris was presented with the Medal of Honor in 1864 and is buried in the Union Cemetery.
Beyond that, people have loved ones and family members buried there who are just as important to those still living.
“What we’re trying to prevent is history from being lost,” Baldwin said. “There’s so much history right here and it’s going to be forgotten.”
Though many of those buried at the cemetery do have a gravestone or marker, some do not. Baldwin has been on a mission to discover where those people are buried — a time consuming task that may seem impossible to some, but not to him.
“There’s a lot in here that we don’t have record of,” Baldwin said. “I did my family tree last year through Ancestry, and I learned I have a great grandmother on my dad’s side ... buried here based on her obituary. I don’t know where, I have no record of it. I tried everything I could do.”
Through lots of research of families, family names, obituaries, dates, and more, he’s helped to find other unmarked graves in the Union Cemetery. He’s determined to find where his family member is buried.
“I don’t give up,” he said.
For more information or to become involved with the Union Cemetery, email Renea Nichols at reneanash@gmail.com.
