Proposals presented to properly preserve Riverside Cemetery

By AMY SATTERWHITE / Staff Reporter for the Southern Standard

City officials are looking at regulating burials and decorations at Riverside Cemetery after noting a number of problems there. Improper stone setting is believed to be the culprit for leaning head stones like the one in this picture.

Riverside Cemetery may be the final resting place for some of the area’s most prominent citizens and historical figures, but some visitors may be inadvertently contributing to its demise.

With city officials citing broken glass, improperly covered grave sites, misplaced stones and sharp wires left over from decorative objects, Riverside Cemetery sounds more like a hazard zone than the beloved historic treasure citizens know and love.

Miscellaneous objects placed by well-intentioned visitors at grave sites get blown around in the wind after visitors leave and can sometimes get in the way of proper maintenance.

“When they put out plastic flowers in a glass vase, it falls over or falls off the monument and breaks and then we have glass out there,” urban forester Nick Kuhn said.

“Or, they’re using wire to stake stuff down, and we can’t mow because they’re using wire stakes and we’re hitting it because you don’t see it.”

Additional problems of improper stone setting or inadequate amounts of burial dirt were noted and Kuhn said the city is asked to fix the problems routinely.

Consequently, he has asked city officials to consider establishing some guidelines on what can be placed in the cemetery to prevent future problems.

He proposed several ideas to members of the Building and Grounds Committee Tuesday, including: requiring “saddle” mounted flowers; placing limits on flowers and other decorations; allowing the city to remove planting pots after a year; prohibiting the use of glass vases or prohibiting the use of tape or glue to affix objects to monuments.

Other suggestions were: requiring that wires or other means of attaching flowers to the ground do not extend more than one inch past any edge of monuments; requiring head stones to be permanently affixed to the ground; requiring foot stones to be no more than 1.5 inches above the soil surface; as well as making some recommendations for soil placement after burial, among many other ideas. A permit system for those who set stones or dig holes in the cemetery was also suggested.

City officials said they will consider the ideas, which they told Kuhn to draft for formal consideration in the future.

“It’s a nice cemetery,” Alderman Rick Barnes said during the committee meeting. “It’s nice to walk around out there and we need to take care of it.”

Kuhn noted he does not want to appear overly restrictive, but is trying to balance personal tastes with public appropriateness and ease of maintenance.

“It’s not that we want to restrict people from putting stuff out,” he said after Tuesday’s meeting. “We just want them to do it the right way so that it doesn’t look bad for other people.”

Although started in 1878, the city has only been responsible for the cemetery for the past couple of decades, with some city leaders noting the maintenance responsibility became the city’s by default or neglect.

Both the Parks and Recreation and Public Works departments have been responsible for maintenance in the past and the urban forestry department inherited the maintenance task about four years ago.