Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410170014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Over the past century, thousands of permanent guests - including this town's leading citizens - have checked into Sunset Cemetery,
resting on a hillside that's below heaven but higher than the community they left behind.
There, beneath hemlock boughs and stone obelisks, they have awaited Judgment Day while years of benign neglect made Sunset Cemetery the eternal innkeeper's nightmare. Some residents were unknown, and the families of others couldn't be found to pay for their keep.
While the tenants never complained, townsfolk became increasingly concerned about Sunset Cemetery's decline. By the late 1980s it had an eerie Halloween-night atmosphere: shaggy weeds, wilted flowers and toppled headstones.
After all, as Christiansburg Town Manager John Lemley said, the way you maintain a cemetery for the deceased says a lot about how you maintain your community for the living.
"The way it was beginning to look was creating an impression," Lemley said of Sunset Cemetery. "Not a very good one."
In 1988, trustees of Christiansburg Cemetery Corp., the 74-year-old organization that managed the graveyard, announced plans to disband. They asked the town to take over.
Town Council, after review, backed away from government control but said Sunset Cemetery needed to be resurrected.
Ann Carter smiles ruefully and shakes her head as she recalls the fateful meeting when she, fellow Town Council member Scott Weaver and several others became the new caretakers of Sunset Cemetery. "We walked in as members of a committee ... and walked out in charge of the whole thing."
More than four years later, Carter and Weaver continue to manage Sunset Cemetery, a demanding responsibility that has become practically a full-time job, with civic gratitude as their only payment.
"They've turned the place around 100 percent," said Dick Horne of Christiansburg's Richardson-Horne Funeral Home. "They have it looking better than I've seen it in 25 years."
Weaver, with weary pride, said, "When we took over, it was the damnedest mess you ever saw in your life."
"We've come a long way," added Carter.
Asked if operating the cemetery has been a labor of love, Weaver rubbed his forehead and laughed. "Sometimes love, sometimes hate. It sure is a labor," he said.
On a sunny morning, with the aroma of freshly mowed grass in the air, Carter and Weaver sat in the white cinder-block building that's the cemetery's field office and equipment shed.
They came - as they do most weekdays and many weekends - to confer with J.D. Worrell, the cemetery's maintenance man. Worrell, a town employee and the cemetery's only full-time worker, Christiansburg's primary contribution to Sunset Cemetery's upkeep. Beyond him, Carter, Weaver and three other appointed directors run the cemetery independently and voluntarily, as a nonprofit corporation. The sale of cemetery plots is their stock in trade.
"We're not in business as such, but it's run as a business," Carter said.
Carter was already intimately involved in Sunset Cemetery. Family members, including her husband, are buried there. She plans to be, also. "I couldn't stand to see the deterioration," she said.
When they began, the 33-acre cemetery on South Franklin Street sprouted more weeds than grass. It had potholed avenues and dilapidated equipment. It also had an outdated racial segregation clause they discarded.
The landscaping problems were tackled on a shoestring budget with an assortment of inexpensive laborers, including lawbreakers serving community sentencing time. Worrell's appointment two years ago to handle maintenance was a big relief to Carter and Weaver and a boon to the cemetery's appearance.
The gravest challenge arose after Carter and Weaver dug into the cemetery's records. "Just a box of maps, all crumpled up, and whatever," Carter shuddered. "We didn't know what condition it was really in."
They found a haphazard, incomplete handwritten ledger of burials dating from the 1880s. During the six years prior to their takeover, no records of burials had been kept whatsoever.
A massive reckoning ensued. Funeral homes were contacted to reconstruct the missing years. Carter and fellow board member Mary Ann Hinshelwood took pen and pencil and walked the grounds, recording each gravestone's name, a monumental task in a cemetery with around 10,000 occupants.
In addition to reconstructing a census, Carter traced relatives of the deceased, a genealogical research project that Carter calls "a nightmare."
Once a pasture on the edge of town, Sunset Cemetery was founded about 1870. The first burials occurred soon afterward. Some graves that predate the cemetery were relocated to the new graveyard.
Probably the most notorious Christiansburg resident buried there - in an unmarked grave - is Virginia Wardlaw of the murderous "black sisters," who were accused in 1910 of killing relatives for insurance money.
In return for their investment, many original stockholders in the Christiansburg Cemetery Corp. got 10-plot squares for their families. However, some of those squares were virtually empty. Carter and Weaver had to determine what plots were occupied, and by whom - to avoid reselling a grave that was already taken (which, fortunately, hasn't happened). "Unless you find someone with the same name, you can't sell the plot," Weaver said.
Family members tracked down by Carter got a letter asking for financial help with cemetery upkeep. The response was encouraging.
Additionally, Carter will soon complete a computer database listing the cemetery's occupants, a record that simplifies billing and makes it easier to answer the many requests she receives for genealogical information.
Both Carter and Weaver hope the town will reconsider taking over the rehabilitated Sunset Cemetery now. Lemley said that's a possibility. "You can't expect those folks to do it forever."
Richardson says Carter and Weaver are responsible for restoring Sunset Cemetery's respectability. "People don't appreciate all the work they've done," he said.
Carter admits she's weary of the responsibility, yet finds the inspiration to continue by strolling around Sunset Cemetery. "I find solace. It's a beautiful cemetery, really. There's a lot of peace here."
by CNB