By WHITNEE ICE
St. Joseph Post
The oldest cemetery in St. Joseph was forgotten until a local community member was searching for a lost relative.
King Hill Cemetery is a cemetery in St. Joseph that has been vandalized over the past several decades and is now being renovated thanks to local activist Gary Lewis.
President of the King Hill Cemetery Preservation Corp. Gary Lewis encourages everyone to come on down to the cemetery to help in any way you can on the community wide clean-up day this Saturday, the 15th.
“Come on down even if you can't do any kind of labor or do anything, come down and look at the cemetery, come down and talk to us,” Lewis tells St. Joseph Post. “Not only are we putting it back physically together, we’re wanting to put it back historically, so we need stories of your family that’s buried there, we need stories of relatives that you know are buried there, we need stories of friends.”
Lewis says all are welcome to come and work at the event.
“People will be going around looking for pieces of stones,” says Lewis. “We'll be flagging broken stones. We’ll be finding new graves and flagging them.”
Lewis hopes that making this a community event, the cemetery will not be vandalized again.
“It’s also more of a community awareness,” says Lewis. “We want people to come up and see exactly the damage that’s been done over the years and then also to take a little more pride in maybe the cemetery once we get it back together to ensure the vandals won’t strike again.”
