To the Editor:

Tim Tulloch did a very nice story last week on the Westerlo Rural Cemetery (“History mixes with greenery as 19th-Century cemetery gests a modest makeover,” at AltamontEnterprise.com).

However, after reading the article I felt really terrible as a few folks who have spent, without a doubt, hundreds of hours of volunteer work with the cemetery, were overlooked.  One noteworthy person would be Steven Peck who takes a lot of pride in how the cemetery looks.

Yes, Steven has gotten a mere pittance of a “salary” to mow the enormous 13-acre cemetery over the last two years, when no one else would take the job, as it involves hours of mowing around hundreds of stones not to mention the hours of weed-eating around the stones.

And above all that, he has done numerous repairs on the lawn tractors he works with that were in dreadful condition.  He even converted one of them to discharge from the rear to keep the grass and stones from hitting the monuments, all for no compensation.    

Steven spent hours cleaning up all over the cemetery including down along 300 feet of stone wall, which was not even visible. He cut back overgrown bushes and vines around the cemetery; he cut off stumps of trees left behind for years; he cut off a broken unsightly telephone pole left behind along the cemetery; he trimmed limbs that hung to the ground and covered stones; he then loaded it by himself into his personal vehicle and took over 30 truckloads to the dump, including a few loads with the contents of the shed now being repaired to help Eric Peterman.

Furthermore, that nice new stone in the article you see for Colonel James Sackett from the War of 1812 —  Steven did hours of research, after finding this important stone broken beyond repair buried under the grass as others had mowed over it for years, to find Sackett’s family.  After months of searching, Steven finally located Sackett’s great-great-grandson, out of state, and got his permission to contact the Veterans Affairs to have a new stone issued, which you see in your article.

Steven has also restored other stones in the cemetery that had fallen over time or were buried under the grass, including one of a Civil War veteran near the vault, which Steven found when he was raking and cleaning up all the rocks and debris left behind after the stone wall was repaired so he could mow in that area.

This time, he uncovered a veteran whose family he could not locate and when that happens you can restore the stone without family permission, which he did out of pocket.   

Steven actually drove to Pennsylvania to purchase a one-ton tripod cemetery stone hoist so as not to damage stones, or have one fall on him. He found the hoist on craigslist, costing a third of what it would cost new, and Steven paid for it out of pocket, which used almost all the money he earned for the entire summer mowing.  How's that for dedication?

Steven also replaced, at his own expense, the old chain-link rope that was missing for years from one of the plots you see right along Route 143 to restore it to original condition.  He has filled in many divots that are in the old portion of the cemetery and there are many more that need to be filled if anyone would like to donate some topsoil!

Thanks also go, too, to Cliff Richardson who loaned his backhoe, Harold Smith who donated a load of dirt, and Brian Peck who helped Steven in his quest to fill these sinkholes over the graves.

During the winter months, Steven still works on cemetery matters as he has been painstakingly putting the names of all the persons buried in Westerlo Rural Cemetery in www.findagrave.com to help families locate their ancestors.  He has gone through and taken a picture of every stone in the cemetery, which took weeks; he not only takes the picture of the stone, he logs where they are in the cemetery and who is located in the same plot to link them.  He correlates all this information with the months of dedicated hard work Junior (Thurman) Bishop did in 1990, recording every death up till that time by recording every stone, as all the cemetery records were burned in one of the trustee’s homes years ago.

In addition to Steven, there should be a huge thanks given to Kate and Alvin Latham who for years have supplied then personally distributed flags on all the veterans’ graves at the cemetery — nearly 150 of them —  an extremely enormous and honorable mission.  

You can judge the character of a town by the way its cemeteries look. Westerlo Rural Cemetery is looking very good thanks to all these folks, as well as many others not mentioned, who have dedicated their time and effort.

Betty Filkins

Trustee and Vice President

Westerlo Rural Cemetery