Thought I would pass this one on to you. Very disturbing article about
cemeteries in Marion County.
Last rights
Historic cemetery in the heart of Indy was all but gone when a "nobody" came
to the rescue Daily Digest
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By Bill Shaw
Indianapolis Star/News
INDIANAPOLIS (Mon, Jul 13, 1998) -- Ever wonder why there is a cemetery or
monument or whatever it is at the southeast corner of Keystone Avenue and
Kessler Boulevard, one of the busiest intersections in Indianapolis?
It's a neatly groomed quarter-acre lot with an old maple and buckeye
surrounded by a wooden picket fence and presided over by the flags of the
United States and Indiana. Beneath the flags and inside a black iron fence
are three stone markers.
Since you can't read the markers from the street and there's no place to
park, the curious often pull into Mildred Crash's wine- and beer-making shop
across the street. Mildred doesn't mind, but she has no answers.
"I don't know a thing about it, and I've been here 27 years," exclaimed
Mildred, who is 78 and runs the Wine-Art Indianapolis shop at 5890 Keystone
Ave. with her son, Ivan.
White-haired Mildred wears a T-shirt proclaiming: "This Beer Is Damn Good."
She promptly launches into an enthusiastic lecture on the virtues of wine-
and beer-making.
What about the cemetery?
"Is that what it is? " asks Mildred. "People stop in here asking all the
time about it, and I say 'I've been here 27 years and don't know a thing
about it.' I didn't know it was a cemetery. I thought it was decoration."
After 27 years, Mildred Crash would like some answers.
Jesse Poole is 78, a retired elementary school principal. He and his wife,
Mary Lois, bought their house on Kessler in 1953 when it was a quiet,
two-lane street arched over with towering maple trees.
Pheasants flew low through their yard, and riders on horses walked along a
bridle path by the peaceful street. Glendale Shopping Center was still a
cornfield, and nearby Keystone Avenue ended at 71st Street on the south bank
of the White River.
Today, 110,000 cars a day cross the congested intersection where pheasants
once flew and horses strolled.
Jesse is a Republican precinct committeeman and vice president of the
neighborhood association. A bird poops in the neighborhood, and Jesse knows
about it.
"I know nothing about that cemetery, though. It's kind of a mystery. How did
it get to be a cemetery?" he wondered. "When we moved here, it was a vacant
lot with broken bottles."
The answer to Jesse and Mildred's questions are found in a most peculiar
place, far from the curious corner with the fluttering flags.
Dorothea Woods Sargent lives in a 10-foot-wide mobile home beside busy U.S.
31 in Kokomo behind a 36-foot-long truck trailer full of junk encircled by
an 8-foot-tall cyclone fence and eight barking dogs.
An enormous portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower hangs on one wall, two
plastic flyswatters on another and books on genealogy fill every flat
surface in the impossibly cramped trailer.
Five red leather-bound books by author Dorothea Sargent, including
"Dorothea's Reader" and "The Sargeants of Mud Creek" sit on the
bookshelf.
The pages of the book are blank. No words.
Why do you self-publish books with no words, Dorothea?
"I always wanted to write books," she explained. "I just didn't have
all the
words."
Anyway, Dorothea is 81 and was married to John Sargent, a prominent
Northeastside businessman and descendant of a Hoosier pioneer family named
Dickerson. Dorothea was married to John 18 or 20 years, she's not exactly
sure. He died in 1991 at the age of 98. That, she's sure about. It was a
complex relationship.
While living on Sargent Road with John Sargent, he told her about his
ancestor's graveyard at Kessler and Keystone. It was a weedy vacant lot, and
this offended Dorothea. The dead should be honored, she believed, setting
forth on a mission to correct an injustice.
Dorothea's story unfolds in colorful fashion, drifting from Pochohantas and
Norman Rockwell to her mother's royal ancestry and back to John Sargent and
the old forgotten cemetery.
Somehow, somewhere, some way, driven by mysterious internal forces, Dorothea
raised $3,400 in 1984 from fellow members of the Daughters of the American
Revolution and erected the imposing stone work and flag poles in the
cemetery.
"God directed me," explained Dorothea with a shrug. No big thing.
Indiana law requires abandoned cemeteries to be cared for by the township
trustee's office, Obviously, over the long years, various Washington
Township trustees ignored the old cemetery and allowed it to disintegrate.
When Dorothea began bombarding the Washington Township trustee with
passionate letters and long, rambling phone calls, the lot was cleaned,
grass cut and a wooden fence built around her memorial.
The current Washington Township trustee, Gwendolyn M. Horth, conceded that
Dorothea's private quest to preserve the corner saved it from further
ruination.
"It was a vacant lot 14 years ago, and now it's not," said Gwendolyn.
"Mrs.
Sargent deserves the credit."
Briefly, in 1835, Hiram and Mary Bacon deeded the land to "the citizens of
Washington Twp. and their heirs forever" as a "burying ground." Exactly
how
much land they deeded is now impossible to determine.
Hezekiah Smith, a Revolutionary War veteran, was the first to be buried in
what became known as Bacon Cemetery. When Crown Hill Cemetery opened in
1864, several bodies were moved there. How many and who they were is
unclear.
In the early 20th century, more and more graves were moved to Crown Hill,
more records were lost, and a "developer" named George Kessler built a
street east of Keystone, named it after himself and destroyed a portion of
the cemetery.
Today, the official record of Bacon Cemetery in the Washington Township
trustee's office consists almost entirely of Dorothea's rambling letters. No
burial records. No names. Nothing, although hundreds of people were buried
in the area. By the time the trustee's office took over the cemetery,
everything had been lost, tombstones knocked over and dead people paved
over.
The Dawson and Culbertson cemeteries, also located east of what is now
Keystone Avenue, have been obliterated -- bulldozed beneath tons of concrete
and asphalt.
Vernon Earle, 73, a retired engineer, remembers finding his
great-great-grandfather's 1862 gravestone in the old Dawson cemetery at
Rural Street and Kessler when he was a kid. One day in the early 1950s, he
returned to find great-great-grandpa's gravestone gone. It, along with
others, had been dumped in a landfill by a "developer." A house now sits on
his great-great-grandfather's grave.
In 1994, the City-County Council allowed Methodist Hospital to build a
clinic at the northwest corner of Kessler and Rural, despite ferocious
opposition from Jesse Poole, his outraged neighbors and a heartsick Vernon
Earle.
"We fought a corporation and lost, of course," said Jesse.
How many graves lie beneath the clinic is not known. A human femur bone was
churned up by an auger during construction. Oh well, probably just
somebody's Mom or Dad.
"It's a horrible, sickening desecration that went on in that whole area,"
said Vernon Earle. "How'd you like your ancestors underneath a house or an
office building or road?"
The civic-minded Bacons of 1835 envisioned a burying ground forever
commemorating the lives of early settlers who hacked a village from the
thick Indiana wilderness. Instead, when no one was left to complain, bodies
were paved over, official records of their lives lost, or their tombstones
tossed in landfills.
Many of those graves contained veterans of the American Revolution, men who
fought to create the United States of America.
Oh well.
Were it not for the passion of an old woman who lives in a Kokomo mobile
home and self-publishes books with no words, the last quarter-acre of the
Bacon burying ground would probably be a fast-food joint, muffler shop or
tanning spa.
The stone marker Dorothea established commemorates Revolutionary War veteran
Robert Dickerson, his family and distant descendants, including her late
husband, World War I veteran John Jacob Sargent. The Dickerson family is
believed buried beneath the marker.
"Organized and Designed by Dorothea Wood Sargent 1984" says the marker
beneath the flags and the Dickerson stone.
Dorothea is now saving portions of her monthly Social Security checks to buy
a sign that says "Hiram and Mary Alice Bacon Cemetery" so the 110,000 daily
motorists will know what it is.
"I'm 81, and my days are numbered, but I'll get it done," she says.
"The
Lord has spoken."
Mildred Crash of Wine-Art Indianapolis was surprised to hear about Dorothea
Wood Sargent's quiet obsession to honor nameless people who lived over 160
years ago and got paved over and every last trace of their existence erased
from earth.
"You don't say -- Revolutionary War people, and the whole intersection was
probably a cemetery," said Mildred Crash. "I thought it was just decoration.
Now I can tell people it's about Revolutionary War people."
Meanwhile, across the street, Jesse Poole, guardian of the Brockton
neighborhod, had noticed a broken board in the cemetery fence along the
street where pheasants once flew low and Hiram and Mary Bacon envisioned a
proper burial ground forever. Jesse went home, got a hammer and fixed it.
"We owe a great deal to this Mrs. Sargent, whoever she is," said Jesse.
No one in this neighborhood has ever met Dorothea Wood Sargent.
"I'm just a nobody," she said.
Sheila D. Watson/Grant County Coord.