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Church official says graveyard decorations at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Potsdam were getting out of control

Posted 5/23/16

POTSDAM – The St. Mary’s Parish sexton said the church’s cemetery on State Rt. 56 has to be cleaned up and many personal items removed because it is getting difficult to keep track of exactly …

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Church official says graveyard decorations at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Potsdam were getting out of control

Posted

POTSDAM – The St. Mary’s Parish sexton said the church’s cemetery on State Rt. 56 has to be cleaned up and many personal items removed because it is getting difficult to keep track of exactly where the plots are.

Many people whose relatives are buried in St. Mary’s were horrified to learn last week that volunteers were removing garden border stones, plants and shrubs, flags and flowers that had been placed at the graves in remembrance of loved ones.

But Sexton William Simmons said that the rules “have been there for 40 years and have been neglected the last few years,” to the point when he and other members of the cemetery committee would go into the cemetery to lay out new plots that it was getting difficult to be sure where one plot ended and another began.

The sudden removal of family objects at graves was an issue made for Facebook, where a message of outrage can spread at the speed of a finger tap.

"They had volunteers go to the cemetery and remove these things without contacting the families," said Priscilla Stark, one of those who is upset the items were removed apparently without notification or without anyone being given a chance to remove the items themselves, she said.

But Simmons said the church bulletin warned the cemetery would be cleaned up for Memorial Day. And he said rules that had not been enforced recently would be enforced once again, to “and “remove items that should not have been installed.”

He said some requests to alter a grave site have been granted, but some people “never request the regulations of what they can and can’t do. Nobody has asked us where the interments are for some of the construction they want to do. It’s up to them to find out.”

He gave the scalloped curbing stones used around gardens, “dug and placed in the ground,” as an example of what they have removed.

“Many people have planted trees and shrubs, which is totally against the rules because these things do not remain small. When they ‘escape,’ and we have a dig a new grave there, sometimes we have to dig between the stones.

“It’s gotten worse in the last few years, so we have had to address the problem,” Simmons said.

He also said they considered trying to notify everyone who is responsible for a plot, and while many of those people are known, many more are not. The owners of the plots are known as “heirs” because they have inherited the plots, and many have not notified the cemetery of their ownership.

“I do not see how this possibly could be right,” Stark said. “How dare you send a stranger to touch my mother’s stuff,” she said. “How dare you pick up a statue of Jesus and throw it on a pile.

“They should be held accountable. They vandalized those graves. If some teenagers had gone in there at night and stolen a plaque, they would be held accountable to the law,” Stark said.

But Simmons said they had no choice because the situation was getting out of control.

“But it needed to be stopped now. If it goes any further, it’s not going to be a sacred place anymore.”