The Day After Decoration Day

My parents called Memorial Day Decoration Day up until the time I quit hearing them call it anything. 

“Decoration Day” is a memory of the Civil War. Nobody alive remembers the Civil War, now, so calling it something else to commemorate the end of school and a car race is altogether fitting and proper. 

Vern took us to the Pleasant Grove Cemetery every year to commemorate Decoration Day. Starting in 1958, it was the place where his mother was buried. Some gravestones there I remember were like sand, gray sand, and so old it was hard to read the names and numbers. In my mind, it’s a sunny day and already summertime hot. Soldiers march with flags and shoot a 21-gun salute. My sister Linda remembers that on the Sunday before what became Memorial Day we went to church services inside before the gravesite ceremony.

“Church there was scary,” Linda said, “because the minister yelled about what would happen to you if you were not a Christian.”

“After church,” she said, “we went to the cemetery, right out the door. The kids roamed the cemetery looking at the monuments. We looked at names and dates trying to find the oldest and newest.” After the 21-gun salute, Linda told me, “We went to the farm for lunch. I am pretty sure we changed out of our church clothes.”

That farm and the church and the graveyard aren’t there anymore because the Mississinewa reservoir project made them expendable. 

In the late spring of 1966, the Army Corp of Engineers had begun moving the 7,000 graves from the area on the verge of flooding to make way for the three Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project man-made lakes. They’d hired a company from Northeast Pennsylvania, to do the work. In turn, the Irwin-Jones Company of Honesdale “hired some local guys to do some of the excavation,” Tom Snyder, who lived there, told me.  It began at the Pleasant Grove Cemetery in the church yard where my grandparents worshipped on May 31, 1966, according to the “Grave Index” log released by the Army in their final report from 1968. That was the day after what used to be called Decoration Day. 

“There was a black plastic tarp stretched across the whole front of the cemetery,” my brother Stan remembers. “That seemed kind of evil.”

“I remember there was an entrance to the front of the cemetery and we walked through,” Stan said, “and there were two guys with shovels digging in the ground. The thing that struck me was they had no front teeth and was smiling as they dug. On the way home in the car, Grandpa told Dad they were convicts.”

“The Army Corps of Engineers had to locate a close relative by phone,” Tom Synder told me, “for purpose of witnessing. They had to contact one person. I don’t think they had to contact anybody else. They mailed stuff, too. A lot of people were in the process of moving. They didn’t have the same phone anymore and it became hard to contact some people,” Tom said. “Seventy to 75 per cent of the families of the people’s graves being moved never responded.”

Stan said that, when he arrived, “They were digging in the front of the cemetery in the oldest graves where Dad had two infant sisters. Dad said that, in those graves nothing was usually found and dirt was placed in a coffee can and that was what was reburied.”

The “coffee can” was actually a “burial box.”  A diagram in the 1968 Army report shows that it was made out of an inch-thick “gray color lumber,” three-feet long, a foot-and-a-half wide and one-foot high. Snyder, who later worked for the Corps of Engineers told me that, “The burial boxes were used for real old graves. They would dig down and if they found a handle off of a coffin, or if they found soil that was a different color, they would put that in that box.”

“Grandma’s grave was dug up with a backhoe,” Stan said.  “The burial vault was brought up with chains. I don’t remember the coffin. I think the whole thing was loaded on a truck and transported to the new cemetery. We all just stood around and watched, not much to say. Then we took Grandpa back to his trailer in Windfall and we went home, on a summer day. 

“What I was told, beyond what I saw, I heard in the car, from Grandpa. He was telling Dad. Convicts. It was just one of those things that sticks with you from when you were young.”

The day after Decoration Day.