The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Cemetery’s grounds-keeping raises concerns
Linda Jean Limes Ellis of Lorain was concerned about dead grass accumulating around headstones and excessively-trimmed lawns Aug. 12 at the Elmwood Cemetery, 640 North Ridge Road in Lorain.
Limes Ellis said she visited the grave sites of her parents, grandparents, an aunt and an uncle July 27 when she noticed clumps of dead grass stuck on her family’s gravestones.
Upon visiting again Aug. 12, the dead grass accumulation had worsened on the gravestones of her family members and of several others, with some flat stones appearing overgrown with grass, she said.
Limes Ellis said the grass around many of the stones had been cut short enough to expose earth.
“If you over-weed-whack (around gravestones) over time with a lot of rain, they start to lean more and they can fall over,” she said.
Limes Ellis wrote a letter to Lorain Mayor Chase Ritenauer with her concerns and posted pictures of the gravestones on her blog and her Facebook group titled “Preserving Ohio’s Cemeteries.”
She said she is involved with cemetery preservation efforts to keep those interested updated.
“I try to make people aware of it because it seems like a growing problem,” Limes Ellis said. “I would just hate to see this continue.”
Former Lorain resident Jane Kaczay, who now lives in Nevada, also expressed concern with the cemetery’s conditions.
Kaczay said with her parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents, aunts, uncles and other family members are buried in the cemetery.
She said if she was in Ohio, she “would be cleaning everything around my family plots.”
The city of Lorain owns Elmwood Cemetery and employs two full-time, year-round employees for grounds-keeping and hired seasonal work from May through August.
Since the three seasonal employees are leaving at the end of the week, Lorain’s Public Property Department’s Public Property Director Lori Garcia said the grass was cut lower than usual to accommodate the workload for the cemetery’s full-time employees.
Garcia said the cemetery’s grounds-keeping normally is broken up into quadrants and dead grass is removed from gravestones with a leaf blower after a particular section is cut.
She said she is not worried about the wellbeing of the gravestones and health of the cemetery’s lawns since excessive weedwhacking is not a normal practice for the cemetery.
“I’m not worried about the gravestones deteriorating because there normally isn’t that much grass on the headstones,” Garcia said.
As of the morning of Aug. 13, dead grass remained on the gravestones.