Society works to record cemeteries

Cemeteries have an unnerving effect on some who pass through them. It could be for any number of reasons. Some aren’t comfortable walking over the dead, feeling some measure of respect for those who have passed before them. Others, possessing a more vivid imagination or firmly held beliefs may yet see the cemetery as a garden of souls, with those who have passed lingering in this world. Ghosts, spirits and shades of all manner still patrol the rows and rows of markers.

And yet still for some, they are nothing, but fields of crumbling headstones with long forgotten names. Names forgotten by all except the Monroe County Historical Society.

“Currently the cemetery committee here at the Monroe County Historical Society is working on several projects,” said Lisa Simmons, the Outreach Coordinator.

One of these projects is the mapping of every cemetery in Monroe County.

“That by itself is a huge project. We’ve finished a couple townships,” Simmons said, noting that Monroe County alone contains more than 200 cemeteries.

Some of these cemeteries are concealed within the Morgan-Monroe State Forest.

Among these include the supposedly haunted Stepp Cemetery, containing tombstones from as far back as the 1800s.

According to local lore, two brothers fought and killed each other for the inheritance of their father’s land. Another terrible accident that took place during the 1930s took the life of a child. Reports indicate that the child’s mother, referred to as the “Black Lady,” still haunts the graveyard and has been said to chase visitors away. Phenomenon such as car engines dying and sighting of the brothers as well have earned Stepp Cemetery its reputation as a haunted graveyard.

The 1930s was also the era of the Works Progress Administration, part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which as one of its projects attempted to find every cemetery in the  county. This effort produced a great historical record of the cemeteries in Monroe County. However, the record is about 80 years old and many of the landmarks used to identify the locations of cemeteries have vanished or been made unrecognizable by time’s passage. This hasn’t deterred Bob Dodd, co-chair of the Historical Society’s Cemetery Committee.

“What I’m doing is using aerial photographs and maps to locate them the best I can,” Dodd said. “There’s some from descriptions we know about where they are.

Sometimes you can see them from the aerial photographs, but the smaller and obscure ones, sometimes not. Some of them I’m locating fairly precisely from the aerial photographs. We’d like to locate them all exactly.”

The Historical Society has been using the Indiana Geological Survey’s interactive maps, which include both electronic GPS maps and traditional ones. These allow the work of mapping Monroe County’s graveyards to be done from the relative safety of a computer desk, far away from marauding specters.

“By using it you can locate a site on the map or the aerial photograph,” Dodd said, adding that taking GPS units into the field to obtain the exact  coordinates was ultimately what needed to be done.

“It’s a pretty massive undertaking,” Simmons said.