Port poised to adopt cemetery

The City of Port Washington is preparing to take over management of Union Cemetery, which holds more than a century of the city’s history, next year to prevent the burial ground from being abandoned.

“It’s inevitable,” Craig Heatwole, the longtime volunteer caretaker of the cemetery, said Tuesday about the move. “It’s going to take time, but the process is ongoing.”

Heatwole, who with Town of Port Washington resident Lee Schlenvogt, make up the Port Washington Cemetery Association, said he’s hopeful the change will come next year.

“To be honest, it’s kind of a burden,” he said, noting he does the bulk of the day-to-day work managing the cemetery.

While that may not sound like much, Heatwole said he’s constantly trying to find the location of various plots for people who are looking for family members or seeking a space for burial.

“One week I’ll have four calls. One week I’ll have no calls,” he said.

But, he said, “I enjoy looking around and helping people find their grandpa.”

Union Cemetery is the final resting place for pillars of the community, including Barnum Blake, Leopold Eghart, Delos Smith and Harry Bolens.

It’s also a place where people who aren’t well known, including some who were never identified, were laid to rest in a potter’s field.

Looming over the graves is the anchor of the steamer Toledo, which sank off Port Washington on Oct. 24, 1856, killing more than 40 people — the exact number is unknown. Many of the bodies that were recovered were buried in a common grave in the cemetery.

There are a significant number of Civil War veterans in the cemetery, among them Edwin Blake, who during the battle of Franklin wrapped the American flag around himself to protect it from capture. An iconic Civil War photograph depicts Blake a few years after the war in his Union uniform with the tattered flag.

There are areas where people who died during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 are buried, and those who passed away during a later cholera epidemic.

Heatwole said a study done more than 10 years ago estimated there are around 1,200 people buried in the cemetery, but he believes the number is higher.

He’s not sure how many plots are left in the cemetery.

The city has handled maintenance of the west-side cemetery since 2017, cutting the grass and trimming the trees, and it’s working to digitize the cemetery rolls.

It’s a daunting task, one made more complicated by the fact the cemetery is centuries old and the logs and books providing its history and the names and locations of those buried there are, in many, cases written by hand in penmanship that isn’t always easy to decipher, City Clerk Susan Westerbeke said.

“It’s all in longhand from multiple generations of the families who managed the cemetery,” she said. “It took months.”

And, Westerbeke noted, not every grave is identified.

“You walk through and there are some that just say ‘Mutter,’ ‘Vater’ or ‘Child,’ ‘Baby,’” she said. “There are no dates, no last names.”

The city is working with the firm Mead & Hunt to digitize the records, Westerbeke said, adding the company is also creating a GIS map of the plots. When completed, the map and records will be integrated in an easily accessible and searchable program for use by the city and the public.

In the meantime, the city is working on an ordinance that would establish a Cemetery Board and the city’s authority over Union Cemetery.

The General Government and Finance Committee reviewed the document Monday with an eye toward making it effective on Jan. 1, but members declined to take action after Ald. Dan Benning said he feared the document did not have the detail necessary.

“We have a lot of holes here,” he said.
“We don’t have fees. Are we going to require vaults for caskets, for urns? Are we going to allow people to plant trees and bushes?

“If we’re going to take it over on Jan. 1, a lot of this operational stuff has to be worked out.”

A revised ordinance will be reviewed by the committee in the coming months, and once it’s approved, all that will be left is to transfer the cemetery to the city, which the association is expected to gift to the city.

“Our goal is to get this complete in the first quarter of next year,” she said.

Union Cemetery isn’t the only burial place handled by the association. Holden East Cemetery in the Town of Port Washington and Holden West Cemetery in the Town of Saukville are also managed by the association. Heatwole said he’s warned town officials that the association may look to turn management of those grounds over in the near future.