File Photo by Derek Redd Mason Randall, left, and Drew West of RanTiff Services of Woodsfield pour a new concrete footer for a headstone at Wheeling’s Mt. Wood Cemetery this past December. A movement is afoot to restore area cemeteries that have fallen into neglect and disrepair.

WHEELING — With a $2 million check signed by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice going toward cleanup efforts after the landslide at Mount Zion Cemetery, Wheeling historians hope to keep momentum going for cemetery restoration at the rest of Wheeling’s graveyards.

Local taphophiles, or cemetery enthusiasts, want to capitalize on Mt. Zion’s public interest and use it to attract volunteers and donations to help clean headstones and reassemble monuments at publicly owned cemeteries in the city.

According to local historian Jay Frey, 36 cemeteries in Ohio County have no private support. These cemeteries vary in scope from the more than 37,000 buried at Greenwood Cemetery to five or six tombstones located in a family-owned graveyard.

“Some of these cemeteries have associations or boards of directors, some never did,” noted Frey. “There is a very wide gamut on how they got to be without any support.”

The city of Wheeling owns four cemeteries: Mount Wood Cemetery, Stone Church Cemetery, Peninsula Cemetery and Manchester Cemetery. Frey explained these cemeteries ended up in the city’s hands when the church or cemetery association that once owned them had to sell them to the city because they ran out of funding or support for their upkeep.

According to Wheeling Assistant Street Superintendent Chad Long, the city is responsible for the upkeep of the land of these cemeteries, including cutting the grass, landscaping and maintaining the roads.

Whoever purchased the plot for a grave is responsible for the headstone.

“If a stone is knocked over, we’re not responsible for that, that’s the responsibility of whoever purchased the stone and the plot,” noted Long. “I’ve had people contact me about who they can contact to set stones back up, and I’ve referred them to other people because we don’t generally do that.”

In contrast to publicly owned cemeteries that leave headstone maintenance to the plot owner, when one buys a plot at a cemetery owned by a cemetery association, the money for the plot goes partly toward cleaning and restoring the graveyard.

In the case of Mt. Wood Cemetery, the members of the cemetery association that once owned the graveyard grew too old to manage it and had no one to pass the torch to. As membership shrunk, the association sold the cemetery to the city, resulting in the restoration and recordkeeping of its headstones falling to the wayside.

Large-scale volunteer cemetery restoration efforts in the city began in 2013 when local restoration contractor Rebekah Karelis noticed the decline of the headstones at Mt. Wood Cemetery. At the time, as a historian and project manager for Wheeling Heritage, Karelis explained that Mt. Wood Cemetery kept “floating to the top” during meetings.

With the city’s greenlight, Karelis launched a widespread restoration initiative for Mt. Wood Cemetery in the summer of 2013. This effort began by bringing in New England cemetery conservator John Appell, to host workshops on grassroots cemetery cleaning and restoration.

With the help of volunteers and a “fair chunk of change” raised by the Ohio Valley Community Foundation, Karelis’s dream of restoring Mt. Wood Cemetery became a reality.

The restoration included both small and large-scale repairs. Tasks such as cleaning a tombstone were completed handily by a volunteer with a cleaning formula and a scrub brush. Other tasks, such as restoring cemetery footers that hold monuments in place, required contractors to complete.

Over the next five years, volunteers at Mt. Wood were able to clean “pretty much every headstone” and reset “hundreds” of graves at the site, according to Karelis.

Preservation efforts also extended beyond the headstones. Volunteers created a record for each monument in the cemetery, which can now be found at the Ohio County Public Library.

“Mt. Wood is one of those places where everyone knows the views and the history there is amazing, but there is also some negative connotation of the cemetery,” noted Karelis. “When we would work up there, sometimes there is drug paraphernalia and evidence that people up there were partying, but it wasn’t as bad as you think. The project helped bring to the forefront of people’s minds that the cemetery is a place of cultural significance to our city.”

After the Mt. Wood Cemetery project, Karelis eased her foot off the pedal of her cemetery work. While one cemetery in the city was cleaned up with new recordkeeping due to Karelis’s efforts, other publicly owned cemeteries still needed attention.

The need for restoration at these other cemeteries is evident to Frey, who described many publicly owned cemeteries in the city as “falling into decline for decades.”

“Until Bekah started this in 2015, nothing was done to these cemeteries except when the city had to intervene,” described Frey. “There have been cases such as a mausoleum fairly close to Mt. Wood in the cemetery that was pretty much open to the public, so what happened to it due to vandalism was rather gruesome.”

Frey created the Ohio County Cemeteries Foundation last year to reinvigorate efforts to restore publicly owned local cemeteries in the city. The group has launched an initiative to restore at four major cemeteries in the area: Mt. Wood Cemetery, Stone Church Cemetery, Peninsula Cemetery and Roney’s Point Cemetery.

“We can’t do everything, so we tried to pick the cemeteries that have the most public interest right now,” said Frey. “We’re simply trying to be responsible about what we can realistically get done so we don’t try to do everything at once and end up getting nothing done.”

While working to counteract years of decline in local cemeteries with only volunteer efforts and donations, Frey noted the markers of a “successful” restoration differ for each cemetery. He gave Peninsula Cemetery as an example of a cemetery that has fallen into much greater decline and so needs more attention from the group.

“There’s a whole range of various types of repairs that need to be done, which is why you measure success in restoration at each of the cemeteries differently,” explained Frey.

The group will replace headstones and monuments in cemeteries on a case-by-case basis. According to Frey, the Ohio County Cemeteries Foundation addresses repairs on the basis of “who needs the most help.”

“We tend to take things by what has fallen into the most disarray,” described Frey. “That requires addressing questions such as, ‘If this monument will collapse, how can we prevent that?”

“We also want to consider, ‘If a stone has collapsed, can we put it back?” continued Frey. “Collapsed headstones and monuments can make the whole cemetery look bad, so it’s more about addressing the degrees of deterioration and what is in need of repair as a cemetery.”

The organization has not yet out a price tag on restorations for these four sites. Donations to the Ohio County Cemeteries Foundation can be sent to 1400 Main Street, Wheeling, WV, 26003.

Frey hopes the public will become invested in preserving the history at Wheeling cemeteries. Local historian Margaret Brennan, who has participated in local cemetery restorations, noted the importance of taking care of Wheeling’s headstones.

“Old cemeteries speak to the history of a town,” said Brennan. “The people who’ve gone before us deserve their graves to be cared for. The fact that nobody has taken care of some of these cemeteries to the point they have languished should bother not only me but anyone in Wheeling. A community should never let this happen.”

Frey added that communities that do not take care of their cemeteries and are “not respectful to their forebears” do not “bear the hallmarks of a varied civilized place.”

“The whole point of this is to remember people,” said Frey. “It’s preserving their memories. They may have been rich, they may have been poor, but they all had some role in this community. What it really comes down to is to treat them with respect.”