Jack Briles continues to amaze me. In addition to all the tremendous effort
and labor he has invested in other cemetery restoration projects in which he
is involved, his efforts to reclaim and retrieve some of the dozens of stones
bulldozed by a Priest in the mid-1960s when Old St. Peters Cemetery was
"cleared" have now resulted in a fascinating article by him on this tale of
woe and the restoration of this site.
"Restoration" is not really the right word for this situation. Because the
Priest's efforts to demolish Old St. Peters Cemetery were so thorough, it will
never be possible to "restore" this cemetery. What Jack and the handful of
dedicated volunteers who have assisted him have accomplished is to retrieve
fragments, bits and pieces of dozens of gravestones that were intentionally
dislodged with a road grader and pushed over the hill, beyond the boundaries
of the cemetery. The cemetery was then left to "go wild". Nearly 40 years
later, Jack Briles had led a handful of volunteers in clearing the vegetation
from the site and retrieving the hundreds of stone fragments. He hopes to
eventually repair as many of these stones as possible and incorporate them
into the monument to the unknown dead which he constructed.
Jack's report is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format on the INPCRP website
at:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~inpcrp/HallofShame/oldstpetecem.html
I hope you'll take the time to download and read this. Because of the size of
the file, I broke it into two segments -- the TEXT and then the PICTURES. It
is also available in a single enormous file, for those of you with lots of
patience or a high-speed internet connection.
Lois