Making ‘amends’ at cemetery
Carroll volunteers restoring graveyard for black veterans after years of vandalism
A little more than a decade after the end of the Civil War, six black Union Army veterans — Reuben Walker, David Ireland, William Adams, Lewis Dorsey, William Massey and Samuel Bowens — established the Ellsworth Cemetery in Westminster on Dec. 21, 1876.
Since then, the cemetery has endured not just normal wear and tear, but also vandalism, leaving some of the plots unmarked and headstones eroded and shattered. The Historical Society of Carroll County’s records show about 50 headstones have been destroyed or taken. Due to its poor condition, the cemetery on a rise behind the Wawa at Market Street and Leidy Road has gone largely unnoticed by the community.
Now, more than 140 years after the cemetery’s establishment, Carroll County organizations are teaming up to restore Ellsworth Cemetery.
The Community Foundation of Carroll County, a Westminster nonprofit, and the Manchester chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, have been working together to refurbish the graveyard. The Knights of Columbus chapter is based at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church.
“Right now we’re just identifying the graves, that a lot of the headstones are no longer with us. So we’re trying to locate where people are buried so we can put temporary crosses in to identify grave sites,” said Daniel Kloss, a Knights of Columbus member. “Hopefully, we can restore what we can restore. I don’t think we can get it back to 100%, but I think we can make amends for the damages. The Knights of Columbus is an order that does work like that; we pick up a challenge like that, especially for veterans.”
Kloss said the cemetery was created because black individuals weren’t allowed to be buried within Westminster city limits.
Union Memorial Baptist Church in Westminster used to care for the cemetery but eventually wasn’t able to keep it up.
“Their attendance went down, and they no longer had either the physical or the monetary resources to take care of it,” Kloss said. “So, a lot of people — state police did it for a while, various churches took it for a while. And six years ago, the Knight of Columbus took it over, and we’ve had it ever since.”
In the late 1990s, George Murphy, a member of Union Memorial’s board of directors; the Rev. James Hinton, former president of Ellsworth Cemetery Company, which was established to open the cemetery but has since been disbanded; and the Rev. Robert Ball, executive director of Westminster Rescue Mission, collaborated to begin restoring the grounds.
“George loves this place, I mean, absolutely loves it, knows everything there is to know about it. He did a lot of the repairing of stones and that kind of thing by himself,” said Audrey Cimino, executive director of the county community foundation.
Cimino has been working with the community foundation for 25 years, the cemetery for eight years and the Knights of Columbus for about two years to help the cemetery. According to Cimino, the foundation pursues grants and donations to give to the Knights to spend on fixing up the cemetery.
Despite the earlier efforts, the cemetery was in poor condition when the Knights of Columbus took over.
“When we got here, the grass was 4 feet high, and we came here to put flags out at the veterans’ stones, we couldn’t find them. Everything was knocked down or it was buried, and it really touched my heart that the service that they gave to the country, and they’re just forgotten,” said Tom Greul, who was a ranking member with the Knights of Columbus when he started helping with the cemetery.
The cemetery also has been deliberately damaged by an organized hate group, Greul said.
It isn’t all bad. Some of the stones, Kloss said, just need to be cleaned and polished.
The Knights of Columbus brought in a contractor who used ground-penetrating radar to find more than 150 unmarked plots with buried bodies in the cemetery. Of those people buried at the site, at least 26 are veterans, and so far 10 of them have been identified.