Port prepares to take over city’s oldest cemetery

The City of Port Washington is on the verge of taking ownership of the community’s oldest cemetery.

A proposed ordinance that outlines the city’s management of Union Cemetery, which dates to 1851, and a fee schedule for burials was approved by the General Government and Finance Committee Tuesday.

The measures will go to the Common Council for approval when it meets Tuesday, Oct. 20.

City Attorney Matt Nugent said the resolution was approved by the Cemetery Board recently.

City Clerk Susan Westerbeke, whose brother Craig Heatwole is the longtime caretaker of the cemetery, was named the cemetery commissioner by the Common Council last month.

The proposed resolution sets forth regulations for the cemetery, including rules of conduct and the sale of plots.

It specifies that no mausoleum will be constructed in the cemetery, and that animal remains may not be buried or inurned there.

Ashes also may not be scattered there.

Each gravesite can be used for one casket, one casket with two urns or three urns, the cemetery rules state, and two urns are allowed in each niche in the columbarium.

The cost of a plot is $800, according to the fee schedule, and columbarium niches are $2,000. There is a $350 fee to open a gravesite and $100 for opening a niche.

The cost of winter burials is three times the regular fee, and weekend and holiday burials are two times the regular fee. Weekend niche openings will be $400.

Westerbeke said the fees are “pretty much in line” with those charged in area cemeteries.

The city has been preparing for the day the Port Washington Cemetery Association would hand over the burial ground for the last several years as the organization struggled to maintain it.

The city has handled grass cutting and other basic maintenance at the cemetery for much of the past decade.

It has also worked to digitize the cemetery records, many of which are handwritten and difficult to decipher, and create a GIS map of the plots.

The cemetery, which is on the west end of Chestnut Street, is the final resting place for pillars of the community, including Barnum Blake, Leopold Eghart, Delos Smith and Harry Bolens.

It’s also a place where people who aren’t well known, including some who were never identified, were laid to rest in a potter’s field.

Looming over the graves is the anchor of the steamer Toledo, which sank off Port Washington on Oct. 24, 1856, killing more than 40 people — the exact number is unknown. Many of the bodies that were recovered were buried in a common grave in the cemetery.

There are a significant number of Civil War veterans in the cemetery, among them Edwin Blake, who during the battle of Franklin wrapped the American flag around himself to protect it from capture. An iconic Civil War photograph depicts Blake a few years after the war in his Union uniform with the tattered flag.

There are areas where people who died during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 are buried, and those who passed away during a later cholera epidemic.