Girl Scouts Clean Up Neglected Danvers Cemetery
DANVERS (CBS) - If you can locate any of the historical graves at the Holten Street Cemetery in Danvers this summer, it is thanks only to the Girl Scouts of Troop 66373.
"Our project really could have been anything," explains 14-year-old Bailey Lopes, "but we wanted to try to find something that no one else has done before."
"Really nobody is currently maintaining this cemetery," says fellow Girl Scout Brooke Elliott. "It was once maintained by a group of trustees but a lot of them actually have died off."
All of them have died, as a matter of fact. So when the girls were planting flags earlier this year, they found a cemetery in trouble.
"You could barely see any of the writing, the grass was so high," explains scout Julianna Bernard.
Adds eighth grader Analiese Jezowski: "The grass was up to my hip. The weeds were climbing up the stones and there was poison ivy everywhere."
So step one was for the girls to dig in themselves.
"We've had a few work days where we came and had lawnmowers and stuff," Elliott says. "And we mowed it, chopped down weeds and stuff like that to help clean it up."
But a few weeks later everything was a mess again.
"It's not very pretty," Jezowski observes.
The girls have been working hard to spread the word of the cemetery's disrepair around town. And late this week someone - they don't know who - showed up and mowed most of the cemetery. So it looks good again for the moment, but there's a lot of work left to do going forward.
The people buried here date back to the earliest days of the Commonwealth.
"They were in the Revolutionary War and no one respects them really by how the graveyard is being kept up," Jezowski says.
"It's important for other people to be remembered for their hard work," Bernard says.
And while she means the veterans, these Girl Scouts are thinking about their long-term work, too.
According to Jezowski, "We want someone to be taking care of this cemetery and we want it on the historical registry so that we can get grants to help keep it up."
They'll be cleaning here again on Saturday July, 11th from 10 a.m. to noon. And they will also be working all summer to reach their larger goal.
