GALVESTON — Allen McCloskey, a 92-year-old grave digger in Galveston, said he was feeling nosy when he decided about 15 years ago to track down an old abandoned graveyard near his home. Someone had mentioned the site to him decades earlier.
What he found was the Old Galveston Cemetery. A nearly impenetrable path along a corn field led to the Civil War-era graveyard located in the woods, nearly reclaimed by nature.
McCloskey saw no one was maintaining the site, so he decided to take on the task. Over the following months, he mowed down the pathway, cut down brush and removed all the fallen limbs and debris, revealing a smattering of fallen headstones.
Indiana is home to thousands of abandoned or neglected graveyards like the Old Galveston Cemetery, according to the Indiana Pioneer Cemeteries Restoration Project. Brush and weeds can obscure some. Others may be buried or vandalized and records indicating they ever existed are lost.
Many of those kinds of sites are maintained under the radar by local volunteers like McCloskey. But after retiring last year from gravedigging, the 92-year-old and his family want someone else to take over.
The question: Who is in charge of maintaining an abandoned cemetery when no one else will?
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Allen McCloskey, 92, has dug 5,500 graves in small towns across north-central Indiana.
Township responsibility
In Indiana, finding and maintaining abandoned cemeteries fall under the jurisdiction of township trustees.
State code says a trustee is responsible if a site was in existence on Feb. 28, 1939, doesn’t have a designated maintenance fund and is not managed by a viable organization.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources estimates there are over 20,000 cemeteries in Indiana. A “substantial” number of those are trustees’ responsibility, according to John Wales, interim executive director of the Indiana Township Association.
McCloskey’s son, Dean, said the family didn’t know any of this until they started asking around a few months ago about who might take over the Galveston cemetery.
“Most people don’t even know it’s there, let alone know who to contact or who would be the responsible person for handling it,” Dean McCloskey said.
Found an abandoned cemetery?
If you come across an abandoned or neglected cemetery, reach out to your township trustee. You can find your local trustee’s office here.
Wales said an “overwhelming majority” of trustees take their maintenance responsibility very seriously — but that doesn’t mean every cemetery across Indiana is well maintained.
“There can certainly be situations involving deferred maintenance or where a trustee may not initially know that a small, forgotten cemetery exists,” he said.
The Galveston cemetery would fall under the responsibility of the Jackson Township trustee. Lucy Reyna, who was appointed to the position in August, said she’d never heard of the old cemetery until a woman mentioned it in passing.
Now, Reyna said, she will look into what state law requires her office to do at the site and maintain it once she determines the scope of her duties.
“I’m a combat veteran, and I’m a huge history buff … so I would love to have the cemetery highlighted more,” she said.
In Porter County, Center Township Trustee Jesse Harper also didn’t know about an abandoned family cemetery in his community until earlier this year, when he stumbled upon the site long thought to have disappeared.
He said he maintains two burial sites of the Kinne family, who were early settlers of Valparaiso, but no one was sure of the location of a third plot known to once have existed.
A surveyor found the tiny site nestled in a wooded thicket behind a housing development while looking into an easement request from a local farmstand owner. The only visible tombstones are two markers for buried pets that may not be associated with the family. The rest are buried by decades of soil and underbrush.
“I really wasn’t aware of its existence, and the prior township trustees never had informed me of it,” he said. “It took someone coming into my office and asking about expanding his farmstand.”
Navigating obstacles
But funding, access and technical expertise all pose obstacles for township trustees trying to fulfill their responsibilities, according to Wales.
Small, rural townships may not have a big enough tax base to pay for resetting monuments, removing dead trees, repairing fences and catching up after decades of deferred maintenance, he said.
Access and property ownership can create additional complications. Some gravesites, like the Old Galveston Cemetery, are completely enclosed within private property with no public easement. Landowners may deny access to anyone without a court order.
Caring for centuries-old tombstones also requires technical knowledge most trustees don’t have, Wales said. Improper chemicals, pressure washing, concrete repairs or lifting techniques can permanently damage historic markers.
The DNR specifically recommends qualified specialists for significant monument restoration, but Wales said he only knows of a few vendors in Indiana doing that kind of work.
Harper said he plans to recruit volunteers to help with the Valparaiso graveyard cleanup, but he still estimates it will cost around $7,000 to restore the site. That’s equal to his entire annual cemetery maintenance budget.
The project will require a special appropriation, but the office should have enough money on hand to absorb it, according to Harper.
He said the cost is worth it because the project will honor those buried there and preserve a piece of Porter County history that was nearly lost forever.
“It’s something you have to take incredibly serious,” Harper said.
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