Spring weather takes a toll on cemetery

The wet spring weather has resulted in some ground damage at the Demersville Cemetery, owned by Flathead County.

Cemetery Director Jan Hardesty said the ground is so wet that there has been some sinking around some of the old gravesites. Employees from the county’s parks and recreation department filled in holes and spruced up the site up in the last couple of weeks.

Vaults have never been required for burials in Demersville, Hardesty said. “There’s always a certain amount of cave-in every year,” she said. And in a wet year, that number usually increases. “It’s particularly wet this year and the soil out there is loose,” allowing for some sinking, she said.

Besides the normal spring maintenance work, county employees are conducting a survey to determine where unmarked graves are in the cemetery and where empty cemetery lots are, Hardesty said.

For a period of time beginning in 1927, cemetery records were poorly kept, she said. Some people were buried in the cemetery with no records made of their specific burial plot. The cemetery record-keeper only recorded that a burial was in the county section for some of the “poor people” who died in that time, Hardesty said. Apparently, she said, the man “didn’t like poor people.”

That lapse in record-keeping resulted in some gravesites accidentally being opened for burials in later years because the plot wasn’t marked as used, indicating  it was supposed to be empty.

Hardesty imposed a moratorium on most burials at Demersville for several years until she could determine where people had been buried.

The moratorium has been lifted, she said.

Now Hardesty faces the task of continuing to “specifically match every grave to every person” buried in Demersville.

While she doubts that she will be able to that for every site, she’s making progress, and that’s important. Unmarked graves will be marked as the process continues, Hardesty said.

As well, “some day we will have a memorial wall” at Demersville identifying people known to have been buried there, but whose specific burial sites can’t be determined.

Hardesty is enamored with the history of the cemetery, located about a mile south of Kalispell, which the county has owned since 1900.

“Every Memorial Day I spend the day out there talking to people,” she said. “When I see people at unmarked graves, I have them tell me everything they know about the person who was buried there.”

Hardesty shared a favorite discovery story.

Three years ago, she met a man who was about 85 years old who was looking for the grave of his little brother who had died about 80 years earlier.

The man could still remember watching a crow that was perched in a tree during the entire service. Hardesty and the man wandered the cemetery looking into the trees. “He even got down on his knees to be closer to his height at age 5,” she said. The man was certain he spotted the tree. Hardesty checked cemetery records and found a listing on the map of an unknown child.

“So we were able to identify that grave,” she said.

Hardesty also looking for volunteers to help clean headstones and “do some sprucing up” at Demersville Cemetery this summer.

Reporter Shelley Ridenour may be reached at 758-4439 or by email at sridenour@dailyinterlake.com.