From left, Patty Mekus, Shirley Roesch, Fred Nosser and Sexton Venable Moore tour through the unmarked graves of paupers in Cedar Hill Cemetery Wednesday. (The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[08/02/01] Fred Nosser’s Ford Expedition squeezes through the narrow avenues of Cedar Hill Cemetery, barely avoiding the tombstones that match the color of the sky on this overcast Wednesday morning.

Nosser wouldn’t normally drive this close to gravesites “I’m pretty superstitious,” he said but he wants his carload of passengers to get a full tour through a Vicksburg landmark today.

And he wants one of them, Patty Mekus, an aide to Mayor Laurence Leyens, to help get more money in the next city budget for the public graveyard he thinks of as a park where he can seek “peace and quiet and clear thinking.”

One of the 10 oldest active cemeteries in the United States, Cedar Hill is a 200-acre collection of conventional tombstones, above-ground vaults and ornate statues of weeping saints, a place where memorials to Vicksburg’s first families stand across the path from the unmarked graves of paupers.

Though they praise Cedar Hill’s “character, ” Nosser and Vicksburg retirees George and Shirley Roesch have formed a committee to push several reforms at the cemetery, which was begun in the late 1830s and rises from Sky Farm Avenue near the northern edge of the city.

The sheer size of the property has been a continuing maintenance challenge for past administrations. Two years ago, cutting the grass was contracted out after constant complaints about inattention from city crews. Four years before that, billing procedures were changed so that families could pay a sum for “perpetual care” rather than continue with the hit-or-miss annual bills the city had been mailing out.

Miles of roads in the cemetery were resurfaced under the administration of former Mayor Joe Loviza. And to address demand for future gravesites, Mayor Robert Walker’s just-ended administration purchased adjoining tracts of land.

Nosser and the Roesches say the cemetery also needs to keep better records, heighten security and explore ways to improve graveside maintenance.

Venable “Brother” Moore, sexton of the cemetery since 1990, listened to their suggestions and agreed with most of them. But Moore said his powers are limited by the city budget.

“It’s going to take money, a lot of money,” he said.

Allocated $415,288 in fiscal 2000, Cedar Hill saw its appropriation fall to $348,830 for the budget year that ends next month.

The cut exacerbated Moore’s staffing problems, he said.

“It used to be me, four gravediggers and a secretary,” Moore said. “Now it’s me, three guys and a secretary who only works until noon. It’s tough to cover 200 acres with that.”

Mekus, who took pages of notes, said the funding will be taken into account when the mayor and aldermen work out the fiscal 2002 budget later this month.

Suggestions by the committee included asking Warren County supervisors to chip in. It’s a persistent issue that city taxpayers underwrite cemetery costs, but non-city residents, who pay no city taxes, bury their family members at Cedar Hill.

“This is something we are very concerned about,” Mekus said. “It’s obviously something that a lot of people in Vicksburg care about.”

Shirley Roesch and her mother cared about the grave of her father, who died in 1950, enough to visit it every week, including one day when heavy snow had obliterated almost every familiar sight in Cedar Hill.

“It was cold, but we were determined to come out and see him,” Roesch said of the February day in the early 1950s. “She did it every week.”

Family grave visits have become less common now, Moore says, victims of a faster world where it’s easy to leave home on an interstate highway and not come back for years.

The changing times have also taken a toll from Cedar Hill’s treasury. Families often forget or ignore maintenance bills and, of course, for thousands of people buried in the cemetery, no survivors are known to exist, Moore said.

A perpetual care payment has been included in the cost of lots since 1995. Depending on lot size, it ranges from $240 to $2,800. But non-payment doesn’t mean Moore and his staff won’t maintain particular plots. City contractors still cut grass and trim around every marker in the cemetery.

“We don’t want it to look bad,” Moore said. “That’s our top priority.”

No matter how well the lawn mowers perform, though, Moore may never be able to fix the tombstones that often crack or sink into the ground after years of neglect, or the fences that collapse around the plots of the long-forgotten dead.

“If I touch that, I’m sued,” Moore said, pointing to the rusted segment of an iron fence lying on the ground beneath a vault. “Only the family can do that.”

What Moore and other cemetery employees can do with more money is keep better records.

Current cemetery maps are crumbling, and past inefficiencies have kept many people from finding dead relatives in Cedar Hill, Moore said.

“So many records have slipped through the cracks,” he said.

A fire destroyed all records in 1967, but lists of burials and plots since then are now being logged on a computer.

But the office that houses the records is barely large enough to accommodate five people, Moore said.

“A new, maybe bigger one would be nice,” he said.

The cemetery also needs to be safer, said Nosser, who said youths with baseball bats once threatened him when he was placing flowers on a grave.

“Maybe we could have an electronic checkpoint at the gate for police to record their visits, so we’re sure we’re getting security,” he said.

Whatever the new city board changes at Cedar Hill, Shirley Roesch said she hopes the members remember its value to all Vicksburg residents.

“We care about it because of what it represents,” she said. “Vicksburg’s history is here.”