Longtime caretakers watch over cemeteries, history
One dates back to 1862, covers 55 acres and contains 9,447 graves. The other began in 1928 and contains just over 200 graves on its 2.5 acres. But what North Side Cemetery in Butler and Epiphany Cemetery in Marion Township have in common are two longtime overseers.
Darrell Daubenspeck of Boyers has been on the cemetery committee for Epiphany Church in Boyers for more than 40 years.
“I'm the one they call when someone dies,” Daubenspeck said.
George Olenic of Butler has been superintendent of North Side Cemetery, 1002 N. Main St., for 12 years.
North Side is one of three cemeteries at the north end of Butler, The others are Calvary Cemetery overseen by St Paul Roman Catholic Church, and St. Peter's Cemetery, overseen by St. Peter Roman Catholic Church.
“The cemetery is 150 years old,” said Olenic of North Side. “The cemetery was started 100 years ago, but there have been burials here for 150 years.”
The chapel and office building on the property are both 109 years old, he said.
“Years ago, this was farmland. There is a barn back there that is our maintenance shop,” Olenic said.
Those, he said, with the exception of seven or eight mausoleums, are the only buildings in the cemetery.
In the early 1800s there were no organized cemeteries in Butler County, said Pat Collins, director of the Butler County Historical Society. The dead were mostly buried on family land.
“People didn't keep track of burials,” she said. “You find out where the people in that area are when people run across burials on their property.”
When cemeteries were started, they were related to a particular church, such as Calvary Cemetery and St. Peter's, she said.
That's the case with Epiphany Cemetery, said Daubenspeck.
The two stone pillars flanking the cemetery drive read “Annandale Cemetery,” but Daubenspeck said Annandale was the name of a long-forgotten train stop, and that the cemetery has been called Epiphany because it's owned by Epiphany Roman Catholic Church in Boyers.He said many of the church's late congregants are buried there. Epiphany is now part of St. Alphonsus Parish along with churches in Murrinsville and West Sunbury.Those church members may be buried in Epiphany, too, if they choose, said Daubenspeck, especially since the Murrinsville Cemetery is closed.Epiphany Cemetery sees four or five burials a year, he said, the latest being just two weeks ago.He expects there will be more. “They are born, raised in the church, (then) they left,” he said. “Now they are starting to die off. They come from Youngstown, Ohio, or Pittsburgh. That's more paperwork involved.” “We average 35 funerals a year,” Olenic said. “Some weeks you will have three or four. Some weeks you won't have any.”Many grave lots are bought in what Olenic called “emergency purchases.”If someone recently deceased doesn't have a place in a family plot or pre-bought grave, Olenic said, “Then the funeral home is going to send people up saying, 'I need a grave lot.' I'll take them up and show them different areas.”“Younger people just don't have the money until it's an emergency purchase,” said Olenic.
It costs $825 to buy a grave in North Side Cemetery. Olenic said neither he nor the cemetery deal in caskets or grave vaults. It will cost another $950 to have the grave dug, then filled in after the funeral and the area seeded.Graves sell for $300 at Epiphany, Daubenspeck said.After a funeral home makes the arrangements, gravedigger Derick Reep from Petrolia is called to dig the grave using a backhoe.Daubenspeck said age has forced him to design a grave template to mark where a grave is to be dug.“I can't go down on the ground anymore” to measure a grave out, he said.So he built a 12-foot-by-16-foot wooden frame. Line the frame up with the plot's cornerstone, drive four wooden stakes in at the corners, lift up the frame and the gravedigger has an outline to work with, Daubenspeck said“That makes everything so much easier,” he said.Of course, even with a backhoe, a funeral can run into unexpected snags.Once, Daubenspeck said, on the morning of a funeral, the backhoe turned up a huge boulder in one of the grave sites.Daubenspeck said he had to call the funeral home to put planned graveside services on hold until he knew whether a grave could even be dug.“But between the gravedigger, the vault company and me, we got it squared away,” he said, and the boulder was removed.“They could have brought the body here, but until we got that stone cleared up ...” said Daubenspeck, his voice trailing off.Although one of the deceased's grandsons wanted to take the rock with him, he never followed up on that plan. Daubenspeck said the boulder now sits between the cemetery and the road.Epiphany Church used to celebrate Mass at the cemetery every Memorial Day, Daubenspeck said, although that's at the discretion of the priest, and it hasn't been done recently.But, he said, family members still pay regular visits.“A lot of relatives and descendants visit the graves. You'd be surprised,” he said.
In addition to mourners and family, Olenic said North Side Cemetery gets a steady stream of visitors.“The beauty of this cemetery is it's known for its rhododendrons and azaleas that were planted by (former caretaker) Lanny Pride back in the 1980s. The back entranceway is filled with them. A lot of people ride up just to see them,” Olenic said.“Joggers, walkers, a lot of people, and from what they tell me when I stop to talk to them, they just enjoy the environment; the rhododendrons, the oak trees. It's just a nice environment for them.”Some visitors seem less appreciative.Olenic said “Two years ago, we had kids come through and spray paint 15 gravestones. It cost $1,500 to clean.”“Three years ago, they stole 25 of the copper rods that hold the veterans' flags. We replaced them with fiberglass holders so they wouldn't resteal them,” Olenic said.Earlier this summer, a Clay Township teenager suspected of leading police on a chase through Butler, crashed through North Side's entrance gate of the cemetery causing an estimated $1,500 damage.“We haven't had any problems with vandalism here,” Daubenspeck said, adding there is a neighbor right across the road from the cemetery and just a little ways farther up Deer Road is the house of another cemetery committee member.Most visitors are benign, said Olenic.“Genealogists have come in to look at burial records,” he said. “We have the information in the books. They will come from out of state to look up the family history.”One of the things kept in North Side's records, said Olenic, is the name of every one of the 74 people moved to North Side Cemetery in 1935 and buried in a mass grave.Olenic said the school district wanted to build a high school across the street from St. Paul Church in Butler and needed to relocate a graveyard.“They brought 74 of them up here. We have a mass burial plot for them,” he said, a plot that went without a headstone until three years ago.Epiphany has its own special graves. Daubenspeck said there was a row of graves right under the trees at the cemetery's edge that he called a potter's field. Most of the graves were those of prematurely born infants, he said, but the section also holds the grave of a World War I veteran who had no other place to go.When Maurice Stader died on Dec. 3, 1960, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Butler, Daubenspeck said, Stader had no family or surviving relations. The VA knew he was Catholic and asked if the cemetery would take him.Daubenspeck said, “For years it was an unmarked grave. If it hadn't been for the register or the map, you wouldn't have known he was there.” Years later a plaque was placed on his grave.But the hardest graves he had to lay out were the ones for his wife and grandson both victims of separate traffic accidents years apart.His grandson, Nicholas Daubenspeck, 16, died Nov. 28, 2003, on Route 108 on his way to a basketball tournament in Slippery Rock.“He was a passenger in a car that hit a wet spot and slid and went over the bank. Nick didn't have his seat belt on,” Daubenspeck said. “The driver had his seat belt on and he was OK.”“He was always good about putting his seat belt on,” he said, and speculated that he might have had it off because he was changing shoes to get ready for the basketball tournament.Both Olenic and Daubenspeck said they enjoy their jobs.“I volunteered for it. I've always been fascinated with cemeteries. I went on the cemetery committee in the mid-60s,” Daubenspeck said.“I've been doing this for over 40 years,” he said, “Doing the paperwork, seeing the graves were marked out.”Olenic, a former Armco employee who took the cemetery job when he retired from the plant, said he will stay on “as long as the Good Lord lets me.”
There are more than 200 cemeteries in Butler County, said Pat Collins, director of the Butler County Historical Society.The oldest cemetery in Butler County is believed to be Harmony Cemetery in Harrisville. It dates back to 1798, according to Tom Hannon, a retired geography professor at Slippery Rock University and one of the compilers of a five-volume history of Butler County cemeteries for the Butler County Historical Society. Collins said “Butler County Cemetery Inventory” is available for research or purchase at the historical society.Pape Cemetery at the intersection of Cooper Road and Route 356 in Jefferson Township is an “orphan cemetery,” meaning ownership of the property is uncertain, according to Collins. She said for the past 15 years the society has paid to have the cemetery mowed because it contains the grave of “Uncle Billy” Smith, the driller of Edwin Drake's oil well in Titusville that in 1859 touched off the Pennsylvania oil boom.A mass grave in Winfield Township went largely unmarked for 84 years. During the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, many victims in West Winfield were recent immigrants who had no suvivors or family to arrange for a proper burial. An unknown number of victims were buried in a mass grave. At one point, the site was marked with a wooden cross made out of railroad ties. But wasn't until 2002, in an effort spearheaded by the GFWC Saxonburg District Woman's Club, that a stone cross and road marker at corner of Sasse and Cornetti roads were placed at the site.
Hannon is doing a study of sandstone tombstones in Butler County and the iconography of their symbols. “I'm arguing that these things should be preserved because they are artifacts. You find mistakes. This is folk art and should be preserved,” he said.Darrell Daubenspeck said one of the saddest days he could recall as caretaker at Epiphany Cemetery in Marion Township was 43 years ago when six people, four of them children, were buried on the same day.They were all related and traveling in the same car, according to newspaper accounts of a fatal traffic accident the evening of June 3, 1969.Erma Dellich, 29, of Boyers was driving on Keister Road in Slippery Rock Township at 8:30 p.m. when her car was hit nearly head on by an approaching vehicle.Dellich and three of her children; Daniel, 5; Jeffery, 3; and Denise, 8, were killed. A passenger, Erma Dellich's niece, Catherine Bonetti, 22, of Harrisville, and her daughter, Christine, 3, were also killed. The only family member to survive the crash was 15-month-old, Larry Bonetti Jr.Inside the boundaries of Moraine State Park there are 13 private cemeteries, according to Hannon.Between 1875 and 1900 there was a brief vogue for tombstones made out of white bronze instead of stone, but the trend never became widely popular. “They just never caught on the way stone did,” said Hannon. Although, he added, during Prohibition, bootleggers were known to hide liquor in the metal tombstones.
