It’s a sunny day in mid-October, and Bill Henley is showing me around the Pine Grove cemetery on Black River Road in Oxford.
Bill is the new Chair of the cemetery board, which now also includes Andrew MacDiarmid, Tory Rushton, Joey Gordon, Mark Benjamin, Rob Miller and Secretary-Treasurer, Elma Thompson.
Pine Grove’s most notable distinction from other cemeteries is the lack of grass to mow. Since its inception, the burial ground has been maintained with bare-earth graves, slight mounds at the site of each grave, with paths interspersed.
There are many spruce shrubberies, allowed under Pine Grove’s bylaws, and that’s one of the current challenges in keeping the cemetery presentable.
Henley says there have been concerns expressed by family members of those who have been buried here. Grass has been growing in patches on some of the graves, and the earthen mounds have worn away with the wind. While you may still find the occasional “Perpetual Care” marker on some graves, He says there is no longer any difference of care at Pine Grove — all graves are cared for equally.
He says the groundskeeper is always working on the site during the open season which ends before December, but with the hot weather throughout the summer, there’s only so much time to work and a lot of ground to cover.
Pine Grove is also perhaps the last cemetery around that still sees the graves dug by hand and shovel.
Henley is hoping a cleanup effort this weekend — Saturday, November 2nd — will go a long way to bringing the cemetery back up to snuff. He’s asking relatives of those buried in Pine Grove and the community in general to come out at 9:00am with rakes and snippers to make a dent in the workload.
The three main tasks for Saturday are raking out the grass, cleaning up the mounds, and trimming back the cedar shrubs.
A key part of Saturday’s work will be the placing of Canadian flags on the graves of war veterans buried on the site. Henley has 50 small flags on hand for placement, and figures that should be enough to cover the soldiers commemorated with the unique military grave markers.
Henley says there are other items on the agenda to deal with, like cutting or pruning the larger trees, grading the driveway, and straightening up some of the headstones. Those jobs will be done by hired crews equipped for heavier work. The headstones, particularly, can be risky to properly set — no-one needs to have a foot crushed under the weight of granite monuments.
The ongoing maintenance of the cemetery is paid for through the investment of the memorial fund, and only so much can be drawn off each year to cover the groundskeeper’s salary and pay for the materials required for its upkeep. Henley hopes a strong volunteer effort on Saturday will ensure Pine Grove is presentable until the next cleanup, planned for sometime before Mother’s Day.
