Canonsburg cemetery seeks volunteers for cleanup
From right, historian Gina Nestor, Canonsburg Mayor Dave Rhome and Oak Spring Cemetery foreman Larry Goodman examine gravestones in the area freshly cleared of brush.
Tree roots lift up a tombstone from 1897. Mayor Dave Rhome said bank erosion along with tree overgrowth is threatening to expose those buried, or allow their remains to spill into Chartiers Creek.
CANONSBURG – The cemetery on the grounds of the Payne African Methodist Episcopal Church in Canonsburg was considered full in 1919, but bodies continued to pile into unmarked or otherwise already-occupied graves.
“A gravedigger spent a day in jail that year for digging up bones and chucking them into Chartiers Creek to make room for more bodies,” said the vice president of Oak Spring Cemetery, Gina Nestor.
Nestor, a cemetery historian, said Chartiers Cemetery continued to take some of the overflow, even as people were buried in the lot on Payne Place into the 1990s. Now, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how many bodies and the identities of those in the graves after a decade of mediocre maintenance allowed trees and overgrowth to obscure them.
Canonsburg Mayor Dave Rhome put out a call for volunteers to assist Aug. 22 with clearing the brush and tall weeds that have overtaken a 300-yard swath of the property line. Other churches and some Boy Scout troops committed, Rhome said. All volunteers should arrive at 8 a.m.
“This is an emergency community project. A cemetery should be pristine. All those people who elected to be buried here, they need to be treated and remembered just like you or I would want to be treated when we’re buried one day,” Rhome said.
There are 172 verified tombstones at the cemetery, according to borough planning commission and survey documents, but there could be hundreds more.
“See that right there?” Rhome asks, pointing to what looks like a cinder block. It’s a tombstone, yet it’s barely visible through the tall trees that have lifted or destroyed other graves with their roots.
“When families didn’t have money for a headstone, they would pour concrete. Even those are being lost now,” Nestor said.
The real and present danger is the sheer bank is slowly eroding, offering the potential to expose more bodies or have their graves collapse and fall into Chartiers Creek.
Last Saturday, Larry Goodman, foreman for Oak Spring Cemetery, volunteered himself with the help of chainsaws, grass trimmers and a hefty helping of gasoline to cut away a roughly 80-yard patch of the property – showing how the rest of the property line should look. He’ll be on hand with volunteers to make sure trees fall in correct places – not on gravestones.
“What happened with this overgrowth, how it got this bad; the church hires a guy to mow the inner cemetery area only three times a year – their budget is $750. But apparently every time the individual was making his pass from the tree line, he came out two inches, then another two inches. That, over a year, compounded by 10 years, you have nature taking over,” Goodman said.
Besides freeing up access to an unknown number of gravesites, it’s about preserving the site’s historic status and the history-making individuals buried there.
“There are black service veterans here who were part of the ‘colored soldiers’ ranks in the Army – freed slaves who voluntarily joined the Union Army,” Nestor said.
Documents with Payne AME Church from 2004 show Samuel Asbury from the 32nd U.S. Colored Infantry, buried in 1910, is one of at least 26 Civil War veterans whose remains are on the property. There are soldiers buried from the Spanish-American War, American Indian Wars and both World Wars. The last major upkeep project to verify the soldiers’ gravestones and restore the cemetery was completed by Eagle Scout Brian Yanosky in 2000.
“The plan is to get this property back into reasonable, manageable shape so the church can actually take care of it,” Rhome said.
The Payne AME Church was established in 1824, with the oldest standing gravestone belonging to John Durham, who died in 1858, according to articles with the Daily Notes, a defunct Canonsburg newspaper.