A new archway made by Russ Grate marks the entryway to New Haven Cemetery. (Callie Jones/Journal-Advocate)
Crosses made by Russ Grate mark each of the graves at New Haven Cemetery. Each gravesite was also decorated with artificial flowers placed by Shannon Covill. (Callie Jones/Journal-Advocate)
The sign at New Haven Cemetery has been repainted by Russ Grate and his wife. (Callie Jones/Journal-Advocate)
The cemetery in the small community of New Haven recently got a facelift thanks to some kind individuals.
Russ Grate has lived in the New Haven area, near the cemetery, since about 1992, and though he has no relatives buried there when the Logan County grader was working on the road nearby and saw some poles and fencing in the ditch and noticed that a farmer was farming over some of the graves that he knew were on the west side of the property he decided to take it upon himself to fix up the burial ground.
The small cemetery that sits just west of the New Haven grain elevator was established by the Curtis family in the early 1900s. While the community used to have a school and church as well, the cemetery is all that remains today. Just a few of the individuals buried there are over the age of 30, many of the graves there belong to young children who died during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Years ago Ross McDaniel owned the property around the cemetery and he used to take care of the burial site before he passed away. But, since then the cemetery had “kind of gone unnoticed” according to Mary Wiebers, a genealogist who collects history on New Haven, “after years of no one caring it had kind of gone downhill and it just didn’t look good,” she said.
That is until Grate took an interest. He went to work and between Wiebers, her daughter Lorreta, Don Larson, and some other locals, they were able to get a deed from the state of Colorado showing the original dimensions of the cemetery, which Grate used to do a land survey.
With the dimensions established, he got to work installing a fence by putting up steel pipe and cable around the cemetery and welding brackets on the pipes to hold the cable. Grate and his wife also took the cemetery’s sign down, cleaned it up and repainted everything on it; plus he welded an archway, with a white cross on top, to put at the cemetery’s entrance.
Once all of that was completed, with the help of Wiebers records he found out where all the graves were located inside the cemetery and made three-foot tall white crosses for every grave that he could find.
Grate started on the improvement project in October of last year, working on it on weekends and during his spare time when he wasn’t grading 95 miles of county road. He was hoping to get it completed before Christmas, but with the weather and other duties that he had to fulfill, it took him until May of this year to finish the entire thing.
Most of the items for the improvement project Grate purchased out of his own pocket, with the exception of some cable and posts that were donated. Circle L Irrigation furnished some of the steel posts and the rest were furnished by Rick Barkley; Marlin Larson furnished the gate that’s on the archway and Don Larson furnished some of the cable. But all of the labor was donated by Grate.
“I think it looks rather nice and a lot of people are should I say happy with it and have commented on it that it looks wonderful,” he said.
Grate continues to take care of the cemetery, making sure it gets mowed on a regular basis. To a certain extent, the grain elevator used to take care of the mowing, but since it got damaged in a storm last June the elevator operator has had “too many irons in the fire” to take care of it anymore, so Grates has stepped up to do it.
There are a couple of other small cemeteries in the area that he would like to make some improvements to also, but the 74-year-old just doesn’t have time what with his regular day job. For now, he’s proud of the work he’s done at New Haven.
After Grate finished his work on the project, another resident, Shannon Covill, who lives nearby and takes daily walks past the cemetery, noticed that no one had decorated the graves. Once again even though she has no relatives buried in the cemetery, she decided to take it upon herself to purchase some artificial flowers and decorate every one of the 24 graves.
“I knew how old it was and I’d pulled weeds around the headstones there. Every time we take a walk down the road we would look at it and we just decided that we wanted to decorate the graves that are left out there with flowers,” Covill said. “It’s very peaceful out there with a lot of what had been forgotten graves there and now they’re remembered.”
Community members are very appreciative of what both Grates and Covill have done.
“I just thought it was awesome that these two people shared their kindness and they didn’t have to,” Wiebers said.