PONTIAC (AP) — Volunteers and local groups plan to install a new monument at a Michigan cemetery that will carry the names of people who died in state asylums and whose graves are currently marked by small, numbered stones.
The monument will include the names of 283 patients and be installed this spring at the historic Oak Hill Cemetery in the city of Pontiac, The Oakland Press reported.
Volunteers and the Better Pontiac Community Development Corporation have spent four years raising the $5,000 needed for the monument. The Oakland County Pioneer and Historical Society also raised $2,650 during last year’s Oak Hill Cemetery Walk for the project.
The graves date back to the late 1800s.
“People will come wandering through that section and wonder what it is. I always have to tell them that those were patients that passed on from the state hospital, which gave one-acre of land to bury these people,” said Larry Keehn, a volunteer at the cemetery since 2007. “I always felt bad about it when they asked. I don’t care if someone has a mental problem, they need to be recognized for who they were.”
The monument will have a decorative front, and the names of those buried there will be on the back. The original stone graves will remain in place as volunteers work on new landscaping for the area. The groups hope to install the monument before Memorial Day.
“These were people, they had names, they led lives just live everybody else,” Keehn said. “We can finally come to this great moment where someone can walk up to this stone and know who is buried here.”
Published: Thu, Jan 30, 2020
