Pictured is one of the cremation gardens at Oakwood Cemetery in Warsaw. Sexton Hal Heagy says Oakwood has seen more cremated remains as cultural attitudes shift.

Text and Photos
By Lilli Dwyer
InkFreeNews

KOSCIUSKO COUNTY — With 89 cemeteries in Kosciusko County, there’s no shortage of places to take one’s eternal rest. Meanwhile, the living adapt new ways of running and preserving these peaceful places.

The biggest cemetery in Kosciusko County, and indeed one of the largest in the state, according to Sexton Hal Heagy, is Warsaw’s Oakwood Cemetery. The 100 acres of quiet, tree-lined space holds 19,476 graves.

Oakwood opened in 1874, but the oldest grave dates back to 1824, Heagy shared. The original cemetery was located near where Warsaw Cut Glass now stands.

“In the late 1800s, the railroad came across and so they moved (the remains) here,” he explained.

Since then, new advancements have continued to play a part in shaping cemetery operations. When Heagy arrived on the job 19 years ago, all of Oakwood’s grave information was still on paper. Since then, Oakwood has switched over to a highly-organized spreadsheet system – very useful when the staff has about 24 hours notice to prep a grave for a funeral and burial.

All graves in Oakwood – and the rest of the county – are GIS pinpointed and can be found archived with any additional information the county has on the online service, Beacon.

“We put in any information we have, military, genealogy, whatever we get,” said Heagy.

The project started back in 2007 under Mayor Ernie Wiggins, and is an ongoing “passion” for county GIS Coordinator Bill Holder.

“I got a phone call from a gentleman that lives in Italy, and his parents are buried here,” Heagy recalled.

The man asked for a photo of the grave and Heagy informed him of the new GIS system.

“I got an email two or three years later, ‘Hal, this is great!’ He could see Pike Lake, he could see where he grew up.”

Oakwood is owned by the town of Warsaw and funded through taxes, with six,

Mary Jo Cox works on cleaning the headstone of Lois and Daniel Leininger in Leesburg Cemetery, using only water, nylon brushes and some thorough scrubbing. Cox volunteers her time to clean headstones in several of Kosciusko County’s 89 cemeteries.

full-time staff. Other cemeteries are managed by churches, township trustees or cemetery associations – boards of trustees who volunteer to organize keeping the grass mowed and graves clean. The Silver Lake and Milford cemeteries are two such examples.

Other passionate individuals supporting cemeteries include Mary Jo Cox of Warsaw, who volunteers to clean graves around the area. Her current project is at Leesburg Cemetery.

Cox enjoys working in older sections, where the headstones are often 100 years old or more, barely legible and covered with dirt and lichen. To care for the stone is to honor the person buried there, in her view.

“That person had someone who cared enough about them to put up a headstone, to remember them, and now there’s no one,” she said.

Cox’s technique uses only nylon brushes and water. She strongly advises against using power sprayers or chemicals. She said these can damage the stone, “and there’s no going back after that.”

Once they’re clean, Cox archives many of the headstones on findagrave.com.

“I get a lot of nice comments on Find A Grave, people who say ‘I wondered for a long time where Grandma was buried’ … it’s cool to know you’re helping someone,” she remarked.

Increasingly, however, not every memorial in a cemetery is a traditional grave.

“Full body (used to be) it, because it was kind of taboo to be cremated,” Heagy noted. “When I started in 07-08, on the average, we were maybe 15-20% cremains. Now, we’re currently 40-50% cremains. We do have in-ground burials, but a lot of people like to be above ground, and that’s the columbariums.”

In the wider world, there is an increasing interest in water cremation and natural burials, with no vault or embalming, but these methods haven’t reached the area yet.

“(A natural burial) is not as easy as it sounds,” said Heagy. “There’s a lot of rules and regulations you have to go through to do that. … It’s not something the city wanted to get into.”

The newer graves in Kosciusko County’s include a concrete vault, instead of an unprotected casket, and are dug by staff with machines instead of pallbearers with shovels, but there is something that hasn’t changed.

“I think the values are pretty much the same,” Heagy reflected. “It’s still holy ground and you’re still here to take care of loved ones.”

To find a grave in Kosciusko County, visit beacon.schneidercorp.com.