For a place devoted to those who’ve died, Greenwood Memorial Park is brimming with new life.
The Centralia City Council voted Tuesday to receive a $30,000 grant from the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation to improve the Greenwood Memorial Park.
The grant will afford the design, construction and installation of two wrought iron gates and the asphalt paving of the main entrance road and loop around the facility’s Pioneer Square.
The move comes at the tail-end of a journey Greenwood Memorial Park has taken from derelict to debonair.
By 2018, the cemetery had been deemed abandoned with tall weeds giving way to open burial vaults, many of which were filled with trash. Fallen tree limbs were strewn about the premises and dirt tracks full of mud puddles traced the cemetery. The grime-covered and broken headstones stood amid patches of grass, while orange cones marked holes in the soil.
The damage done to the cemetery was synonymous with neglect, as former owner John Baker let the place fall into disrepair due to personal and legal troubles, according to previous Chronicle reporting.
“People were heartbroken because they could no longer visit the graves of their loved ones in a way that they felt was appropriate,” said cemetery spokesperson Marveen Rohr at Tuesday’s Centralia City Council meeting.
But since 2018, Centralia received $250,000 from the state to purchase the cemetery, subsequently obtaining an additional $500,000 from the 2019 state capital budget for its restoration.
The city’s efforts on the matter have “really been a project of the heart,” Rohr said.
The cemetery, which holds more than 2,000 graves, had undergone quite the transformation as of 2021, according to previous Chronicle reporting.
The city and stakeholders removed dead trees, cut back the overgrown brush, power washed the headstones and repainted the concrete vaults, replacing those broken.
To continue the work, Rohr announced during Tuesday’s meeting that the cemetery will hold a work party at the cemetery from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday, May 21.
“When we were trying to describe the importance of the clean-up day, (a) person said, ‘We have the silver, we just need to polish it,’” Rohr said.
The work party will come just in time to spruce the place up for the cemetery’s official rededication ceremony from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday, May 28.
“This will honor all the people in the past that are buried in the cemetery, but there will also be an extra, formal military ceremony for all veterans that are buried in the cemetery,” Rohr said of the impending rededication.
For now, with the $30,000 grant, the work continues.
The soon-to-be constructed wrought iron gates will be powder-coated white and around 4-feet high and 12-feet wide. The color is set to match the "white" theme of the above-ground vaults and entrances in the cemetery as it was originally designed by its founders, according to council meeting agenda documents.
The asphalt paving of the main entrance road and loop around Pioneer Square will include three to six parking stalls, with the city grading and adding a sub-base to the project as needed.
