[AT] funny..sorry long

[Bill "Bear" Hood]

Farmer and Larry
I am not into genealogy, but I really feel these old cemeteries
need to be preserved and vandalism kept curtailed. I like to walk
around, read the headstones and get a feeling for the stories buried with these ancestors. 

When my son was 15 and working on his Eagle Scout, his project was to
restore a remote West Texas cemetery. This was the Oak Creek Community
graveyard in western Nolan County. It had 72 graves dating from 1879 to the 1950s. The fences were in poor repair--barbed wire on 2 sides--and livestock were often seen grazing there. It was a beautiful location on the east side of the creek and gently sloping to the west with live oak motts scattered.  All of the fence lines were growing up in mesquite and prickly pear.   


Brad's project was to fill in the sunken graves, reset fallen stones, and
rebuild the fences. Only a few family sites were being cared for by
living families. He called a meeting of all interested descendants and the
widow of a local large ranch family, whose parents and grandparents
were interred there, offered to underwrite the cost of fencing. I
hauled over 29 yards of fill dirt and furnished a skid loader to start
the leveling. Scouts and volunteer adults were organized over 5 Saturday work days.
 
During the first work day, another local rancher with no ties to the cemetery.
offered to bring his dozer and push out the brushy fence rows. The iron
fence in front was removed in order to facilitate machine work with
damaging the fence. We brought out our compressor and potandsand blasted the fence on another day and primed and painted it with Boy Scouts.    


The end results was a level, clean, manicured grounds with a new fence and
new gate sign courtesy of another family. The community gathered on the
3rd of July, 1984 and re-dedicated the grounds, formed an association, and
started raising funds to establish a maintenance fund.Sometimes we humans need to be prodded into activity.  

I was proud of my son and the other Scouts in my Troop--and I think that
my son is still proud of what he organized and accomplished. I went
back by there a few years ago and it is still clean, manicured for dry
West Texas, and no brush has grown up in the fence yet. There is a lot
of history in these little plots and they can be lost to neglect in a
short period of time. May our lives never be lived so fast, that we
cannot give some time to those who came before us. 
Bear

Sorry this is so long, but the thread made me want to tell this story. 

Live every day of your life like a three year old.  Get down in the dirt with it, roll in it and smile a lot.  Bear

--- robinson at svs.net wrote:

From: "Francis Robinson" <robinson at svs.net>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Subject: RE: [AT] funny..
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:16:40 -0400

-----Original Message-----

I found a new "need" for a butt buggy today.  I'm tramping through
some pretty rough terrain in cemeteries in the upper Ohio valley,
and it sure would be nice to have my Jim Dandy (Economy) tractor
with me equipped with the dual transmissions and 12.25:1
differential to cruise around looking for tombstone inscriptions
(genealogy work).  With the sunken graves (no vaults), a super-slow
tractor would be a tremendous help.

Larry


	Hi Larry:

	As it happens I also was out of state tramping cemeteries for the last
couple of days. I didn't really have the time but the planets lined up or
something and an opportunity presented its self.  It would have taken a
good-sized dozer to have gotten through one that I was in this morning...
Really over-grown...   ;-)    Really sad how little respect people have for
those former living breathing souls that came before us and gave us the best
of what we have today. I found out yesterday that I need to return to one
cemetery soon to replace 5 vandalized stones of family members. They were
damaged since I was there last maybe 4 years ago. They are small stones but
it is going to be a bit expensive and it is a 5-hour drive one way.  On a
brighter note, three small cemeteries that I had not been in before were in
nice shape and very well kept.
	We did once use a tractor in a cemetery. When I was a teen my local 4-H
club took on the care of a small abandoned cemetery only a quarter mile from
the farm. It had so many deeply sunken graves that the club had a big load
of fill dirt brought in and then I took the John Deere 40C crawler in and
carefully leveled the whole thing. The club then reseeded it and held the
mowing contract with the TWP for many years. That was in the 1950s and the
club got $50 a year for maintaining it. The club is now gone but the TWP
still pays someone to mow it. It still looks quite nice. I'll bet the TWP
has to pay a lot more than $50 a year now.   ;-)

--
"farmer"

The brave may not live forever but the easily frightened may never live at
all.

Francis Robinson
Central Indiana, USA
robinson at svs.net




_______________________________________________
AT mailing list
Remembering Our Friend Cecil Monson 11-4-2005
http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at



_____________________________________________________________
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.