Veterans support financially strapped cemetery
Oak Grove Cemetery, where more than 580 veterans from wars going back to the Revolution are buried, is getting some financial help from today’s veterans.
American Legion Post 51 in Uniontown has donated $800 to the 15.5- acre cemetery located just west of Uniontown in South Union Township, which the Oak Grove president, Dr. Gary Brain, said will be used to help assure the cemetery’s financial future.
“Right now, we’re trying to increase our trust fund,” Brain said.
The cemetery’s board of directors is only able to spend the interest generated by the trust fund, Brain said, which is about $3,500 a year, with $2,500 of that money going to First National Bank to manage the fund. Brain has said it costs $3,900 each time the cemetery is mowed professionally, so the board often relies upon volunteers to handle the mowing.
“We could use volunteers to trim around the stones and to make it look really presentable. You really ought to blow off the grass afterward,” Janet Marker, vice president of the cemetery board told members of Post 51.
“By cutting the cemetery, we found a lot of old graves going back to 1812, and a number of Civil War soldiers we didn’t know were there.”
Brain noted that the oldest section of the cemetery is not laid out in neat rows of graves, making it difficult to cut and hard to document.
Post 51 Cmdr. George Dextras said he hopes the cemetery’s board puts the money to good use.
“We’d like to make this an annual project,” Dextras said. “Hopefully, this article in the paper will challenge other clubs and other organizations to donate.”
Eugene Funk, who is on the executive board of Post 51, is also commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7219 in Fairchance.
“I can’t think of any better cause to donate to,” Funk said. “That’s an historic landmark.”
Funk encouraged Marker to contact his VFW post for assistance.
The cemetery board will meet Thursday with Fayette County officials to challenge the cemetery’s tax status.
It is currently on the county tax sale list, although Marker and Brain contend the cemetery was never to be on the tax rolls and only recently appeared there.
“We’re asking them to waive the taxes because an action was taken when the state Legislature formed the cemetery in 1849 that it was to be tax-exempt,” Brain said.
Brain and Marker said there was a period when all members of the cemetery’s board of directors had died and before the new board was appointed by Fayette County Court.
It was during that period that the county underwent reassessment and it is then that it is believed that the cemetery began being taxed, Brain said.