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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 17 August 2004 |
Cemetery work never ends; more equipment would save time, money, superintendent says
By Diane C. Beaudoin
TOWNSEND -- James Tumber, head of the Parks and Cemeteries Department, spends his days keeping the town's public park and cemetery land looking as good as possible, and he does it with very little equipment.
Tumber's responsibilities include burials, cemetery maintenance, and keeping the town common mowed and cleaned as well as the grounds around the library, police station, and fire department buildings.
"People don't realize how much land we have to take care of," Tumber said outside of his office on Highland Street.
"The hard part is, we don't have a lot of equipment to do it all with," he noted.
Tumber's crew works with four weedwhackers, two push lawn mowers, one riding mower and three leaf blowers to do the 53 acres of cemetery in town.
"When we do the Old Burial Ground, we have to be exceptionally careful. The markers are very fragile," he said.
A walk through the old cemetery finds slate markers dating back to 1735. Many of Townsend's Civil War dead have been laid to rest on that one acre site.
"We would love to find a way to repair the markers that have been damaged, but we don't have the money to do that," Tumber said. He noted that when that area is mowed, many of the markers are loose, only in the ground less than a foot.
"We've tried some different types of glues on the stones, but we haven't found what works yet," Tumber said.
Shrubs around markers in Hillside Cemetery are causing a problem for the maintenance crews as well. "We would like people that want to plant shrubs to use dwarf varieties. That way they don't grow tall and surround the entire marker, and it saves us a lot of work," he said. "We like to keep the cemetery and the markers looking nice."
Tumber explained that the entire process to inter someone takes approximately three hours for a two-man crew. "We always do the digging with two of us, so if anything happens, no one is out there alone. By the time we get the equipment there, dig, remove the dirt, lay the plywood and get everything ready, you are looking at three hours."
The workload at the cemeteries never experience a slow season. "We have spring clean up, then all the repairs in the summer. Then we have fall when we end up with leaves that tower over the top of the cemetery garage. In winter, we have all the plowing, and we are the only town around that does bury people in the winter. It just keeps going," he said.
Tumber would like to see the Cemetery Department modernized, with safer and easier to use equipment. "We do a lot of the town's properties, and it would make it so much better to be able to do the work more efficiently. Even if we had a trailer to keep the mowers on, so we could just drive to the site where we are needed. It would save man-hours to my budget," he said.
Tumber noted that currently, the equipment is stored in the garage, and some in the crypt. "We have to load and unload, so we're touching the equipment four times. If it was trailered, we would cut that time in half," he said.
Tumber plans to spend some of his time compiling the old burial information into binders so that research can be done easily. "I had a woman from New York call the other week looking for information on someone buried in the Old Burial Ground. She thinks it could be an ancestor of hers," he said. "We'd like to help her find out."
http://www.townsendtimes.com/Stories/0,1413,112~6010~2332566,00.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“The cradle of the future is the grave of the past.” Franz Grillparzer
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