Cleaning graves, honoring history: Pennsylvania church creates community impact

A group of volunteers has been showing up with chainsaws, weedwhackers, trimmers, and determination at Trinity United Church of Christ.

This small church in Fort Loudon, Pennsylvania, is on a mission to clear out and restore its sizable church cemetery that holds significant pieces of the town’s history.

Volunteers from the church and broader community, ranging in age from 15 to 75, started gathering once a month in May to begin cutting down overgrowth covering areas of their graveyard.

It’s a project that has led to learning about the faith community’s and city’s history, while addressing the challenge it can be for a small church to steward a large property.

“As we uncover these graves, we feel that we are honoring those who have gone before us,” said Linda Best, president of the consistory.

Small, but mighty

With a small, aging church – Best estimates that around 15 people regularly attend worship – the church had trouble maintaining the old cemetery, which was actually two distinct cemeteries that combined decades ago when two churches joined to create Trinity UCC. While the graveyard has been regularly mowed by the town’s cemetery association, dense vines and volunteer trees crept into the space that holds several hundred graves.

Best described the church as small, but mighty. “Most of us are retired from our jobs, but not retired from our work for the Lord,” she said.

Now the church invites community members to join them on the second Saturday of each month to clear and maintain the space.

‘Learning as we go’

As volunteers began scrubbing the moss-covered headstones, they uncovered names of people of historical significance to their town, Civil War veterans, and World War veterans.

“We are learning as we go,” Best said. She said the task can seem daunting when she considers the hundreds of graves, but one that has made for interesting and satisfying work for those who have participated – like a teenager who came with his mom to the most recent workday and expressed interest in continuing to help.  

The volunteers have also set out to create a written record of people buried there.

“It really does feel like an act of discovery, because the cemetery records are missing. We’re in the unique situation of not only needing to clear it, but also needing to record what we find,” said the Rev. Peter Billings, pastor of Trinity UCC.

“They are the people who founded these churches that we’re using now, and their families. This is a way of honoring and remembering them,” Best said.

New connections

The church has received positive feedback and made new connections from their efforts. When sharing their clean-up progress on the church’s Facebook page, they received gratitude from several people, one who shared that his sixth-great grandfather is buried there.

During a recent visit to the church, Best encountered a woman searching for her grandfather and great-grandfather’s grave and learned from her that one of them had been a carpenter and built coffins for many of the people buried in the cemetery.

“She was so happy because she was able to see the grave,” Best said, which was particularly meaningful as it was the woman’s final visit to the grave before moving across the country. “The last time she was there it was completely covered up with vines and you could hardly see it.”

 With one Saturday each month, the group has come a long way in restoring the space.

“I just want to tell people that even though you’re a small group, you can still do a lot,” Best said. “And it makes me hopeful that people are taking care of my relatives where they’re buried.”

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