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- JANESVILLE - Evalyn G[race] MILLARD, 95, of Janesville,
died at Cedar Crest
- Health Center Saturday, Feb. 4, 2006.
- Evalyn was born in Afton, WI, on Dec. 8, 1910, the daughter
of Guy and Eva
- (HANDY) HOLLIDAY. She married Floyd MILLARD
on June 26, 1929, in Belvidere, IL; he died on Nov. 21, 1952.
Mrs. MILLARD graduated from Milton Union High School.
She was formerly employed by Borg's and later for 25 years by
Gibb's Manufacturing, until retiring in 1976. Evalyn was a charter
member of Asbury United Methodist Church where she was a member
of the choir for 30 years. She was a member of the Sweet Adelines
for 20 years and was active in music circles for many years.
- Mrs. MILLARD is survived by 2 grandchildren, Gregory
"Greg" (Gerri)
- HANTHORN and Ginger SMITH, both of Janesville;
2 great-grandchildren, Samantha and Morgan SMITH; her
son-in-law, Gerry HANTHORN of Johnstown Center; a sister,
Esther RASMUSSEN of Janesville; and many wonderful nieces
and nephews.
- In addition to her husband and parents, she was preceded
in death by her daughter,
- Virginia HANTHORN; her son, Howard MILLARD;
3 brothers: Rev. Walter HOLLIDAY, Rev. Ralph HOLLIDAY
and Howard HOLLIDAY; and 3 sisters: Gladys TIFFANY,
Helen SAUNDERS and Ruth MANSUR.
- A visitation will be held at Asbury United Methodist Church,
1810 Kellogg Ave.,
- Janesville, on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, from 12 noon until
2:00 p.m., with funeral services to follow at 2:00 p.m. Rev.
Ann Spindt will officiate. Interment will follow in Milton Lawns
Memorial Park. In lieu of other expressions of sympathy, memorials
may be made to HospiceCare, Inc., 3001 W. Memorial Dr., Janesville,
WI 53548. Assisting the family is Henke-Clarson Funeral Home.
[Monday edition]
-
- Courtesy of Jon Saunders
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| 19 |
- The
dead really do tell tales
- Rock County cemeteries offer a wealth of
history
- By Marcia Nelesen
 |
- Janesville
- Janesville City Planner Gale PRICE crossed his fingers
- as diggers excavated for the new Hyundai dealership near
Target on Highway 14.
- The site is just feet from the Dillenbeck Cemetery, and
- corpses have been known to migrate.
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- "Periodically, with a turn-of-the-century cemetery,
it happens that there are caskets not
- where people thought," Price said.
- If a corpse had been unearthed, construction would have been
stopped and a laborious
- procedure would have begun to relocate the body.
- Thankfully, the DILLENBECKs and the ZIMMERMANs
and even Little Eddie -
- "Our Little Eddie's Gone Home," one stone mourns
- have stayed put.
- But since the developer tore down the nearby, two-room DILLENBECK
School, the
- cemetery's worn and tilting headstones are even more of an
anomaly among the traffic, neon lights, retail stores and restaurants.
- "My understanding is, it's very difficult to move a
cemetery," Tom ROGERS, assistant
- city manager, said. The city has been responsible for the
mowing since the land was annexed in 1964.
- Still, the rural cemetery and its 13 or so residents manage
to maintain a shroud of
- dignity and gravity as palpable as the smell coming from
the nearby steak house.
-
- Bodies all around
- Dillenbeck Cemetery and St. John's Cemetery, which is off
Beloit Avenue on
- Janesville's south side, are the two known inactive cemeteries
in Janesville.
- A third, the Rock County institution's cemetery, is in back
of Sportsman's Park on
- Highway 51 and butts up against the city.
- Four cemteeries are still active: Milton Lawns Memorial Park,
Oak Hill Cemetery and
- Mount Olivet Cemetery. Trinity Episcopal Church has a columbarium
that was built when the church was remodeled in 1979. The 147
niches in a basement wall can house two urns each.
- At least 84 cemeteries dot Rock County. Some are active,
some aren't. In describing
- the latter, cemetery guru Lori NIEMUTH prefers the
term "inactive" rather than "abandoned."
- It turns out that people are buried all over.
- They're buried next to Target.
- They're buried in a farm field in Johnstown.
- They're buried in the basement of Trinity Episcopal Church.
- They're buried in Carver-Roehl Park in Bradford Township.
- NIEMUTH, who lives in Richmond Township [Walworth
County, WI], is the
- county's volunteer caretaker of numerous historical Web sites.
She and Rhonda McNURLAN of Johnstown Township photograph
tombstones and transcribe the words at burial sites. NIEMUTH
has put 3,327 tombstone photos online, and more than 2,000 wait
in her computer.
- NIEMUTH loves local history, and cemeteries are a
treasure trove of records.
- Birth, death and marriage recorsd were not required prior
to 1907, she said. Some-
- times, a tombstone is the only proff that a relative existed.
- The names and ages on the worn stones tell stories.
- Two influenza epidemics - one in the early 1890s and another
from 1917 to 1920 - are
- documented in the many graves of infants and young women
who died, probably during childbirth, she said.
- The Rock County Farm Cemetery strikes her as said, mostly
because the stones have
- no names.
- A cyclone fence surrounds the squat, concrete columns that
are inscribed with only a
- number. The county's 276 poor residents who lived in the
nearby county institution were buried there from 1894 to 1962.
- A line of graves is just yards from Little Tykes play equipment
and a jungle gym in
- abutting back yards.
- "It's the creepiest feeling," NIEMUTH said.
"They're just numbers."
- After seven years, NIEMUTH recently located the list
of names that match the
- numbers - in the county's park department.
- Rock County Park Director Mike GUISELMAN is fond of
cemeteries himself, and
- will sometimes cruise the countryside in search of old graveyards.
His favorite is the Irish Cavalry Catholic Cemetery near Magnolia
Park.
- The first county poor farm was in Johnstown Township and
was active until the 1880s.
- "If you're good, you can find it," NIEMUTH
said.
- It's just east of Johnstown and marked by a fire number on
a farm entrance to a field.
- "Some say there are as many as 200 burials in that cemetery,"
she said. "About 10
- right now is all that you can find."
- In Janesville, St. John's Cemetery is located off Beloit
Avenue on Mule Hill on property
- that used to be the HUGHES farm. The plot is marked
by a rock and a plaque placed by the Daughters of the American
Revolution. Supposedly, early settlers Samuel SAINT JAMES
[ST. JOHN] and his first and second wives were once buried
there but were moved in 1855 and 1856 to Oak Hill Cemetery.
- Why are they there?
- "This isn't the gospel according to St. John,"
Bill HUGHES warned.
- The story goes taht the pioneers wanted to be buried where
cattle could roam over
- their graves, HUGHES said.
- "That's probably the only place in Janesville where
the cattle still do roam," he said.
-
- Buried treasure
- NIEMUTH prowls graveyards all over the county. Sometimes,
they are little more
- than fields of weeds with stones worn and uprooted by the
weather.
- Other times, humans cause the damage.
- "We've had a lot of vandalism lately," NIEMUTH
said. "It's starting to stress me out
- a little bit."
- The stones that topple and those already flush to the ground
are easy prey to nature.
- They just disappear beneath the grass.
- With permission, NIEMUTH pokes into the dirt with
her stick tipped with a nail,
- listening for the distinctive "clink" of a tombstone.
[Actually, I gently push the blunt nail into the ground until
it meets resistance, and then peel back the sod to see what I've
found. - Lori] Burials in most cemeteries are every 5 feet. When
she finds one, she can get a bead on the rest of the graves.
- NIEMUTH also locates burials by taking soil samples.
From a core sample of dirt,
- she can tell whether the soil has ever been disturbed.
- NIEMUTH's tombstone pictures also document cemetery
art.
- "From an aesthetic view, it's a lost art," she
said.
- Modern stones are usually simple and cut with lasers.
- "The old ones - these guys actually sat with hammer
and chisel and carved out little
- birds and angels and flowers," NIEMUTH said.
"The stuff I find in old cemeteries is incredible."
- Headstones are usually marble, granite or soapstone. Unfortunately,
the wind washed
- the writing off the popular but soft soapstone [I've only
found 3 soapstone graves; white marble is also extremely susceptible
to wind erosion. - Lori] Not really a rock of ages, NIEMUTH
said.
- NIEMUTH's favorite cemetery is Happy Hollow Cemetery
between Janesville and
- Beloit. After a hike through brush and up a hill, "All
of the sudden, you feel like you're in Salem, Mass. It's so quite...
a bit creepy, too."
- Last year, someone buried a dog on top of a body there. That's
illegal and NIEMUTH
- said she thinks the police made the guy dig it back up.
- "You cannot bury things in a cemetery unless you're
the sexton, basically," she added.
- While she prefers Happy Hollow, her son likes Luther Valley
Church Cemetery, where
- the paths are paved and he can ride his bike while his mom
documents the cemetery.
- Cooksville Cemetery is so pretty, "and Fulton is so
peaceful... and so on," she said.
- Sometimes, the cemeteries are truly abandoned, such as Mechanics
Green Cemetery in
- Beloit and the old Jefferson Cemetery near the courthouse
in Janesville. At both, the bodies were removed and taken to
other cemeteries.
- The Janesville cemetery was emptied in the middle of the
night to clear a site for the
- new high school.
- "It was raining, and these wooden caskets had been in
the ground... you can imagine
- the mess," NIEMUTH said.
- "This was in the old wagon days. They threw them in
the back of a wagon and said,
- 'Let's go.'"
- Other cemeteries were platted but never used, such as Twilight
Rest in Beloit. And yet
- others are extinct: "We knew they existed at one time,"
NIEMUTH said. "We don't know where they are now."
- The Rock County pet cemetery is off County M.
- "Now that's another story," NIEMUTH said.
- The Web site for Rock County cemeteries is at www.rootsweb.com/~wirock
- Other historical Web sites include the American Local History
Network-Rock
- County at www.usgennet.orgusa/wi/county/rock/ and Wisconsin
Biographies-Rock County at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~wirockbios.
|
- DIGGING UP FACTS
-
- Cemetery trivia from Lori NIEMUTH:
- Rock County is home to at least 84 cemeteries.
- La Prairie Township is the only township without a cemetery.
- Of the 84 cemeteries, 54 have been transcribed and are online
on a Web site she maintains.
- Regarding cemetery names, sometimes nobody seems to agree.
In Porter Township, for instance, the same cemtery is known as
Wheeler Cemetery and as South Porter Cemetery and as Gibbs Burials
and as Taylor Cemetery. The genelogical society's 1986 book,
Rock County Cemeteries and Churches, lists it as three different
cemeteries in three different locations.
- "City cemetery" listed in an old Janesville obit
actually means Oak Hill - unless the person was Catholic, in
which case the deceased went to St. Patrick's Cemetery, now Mount
Olivet.
- Don't confuse Mt. Olivet in Janesville with Mt. Olive/Sandy
Sink Cemetery in Fulton Township. Neighbors recently spiffed
up the cemetery, which had been a mess.
|
- [Sunday edition, pp. 1A & 7A]
 |
Cemetery
fascination began early
- By Marcia Nelesen
-
- Janesville
- Lori NIEMUTH never played the child game of holding
- her breath as the school bus passed a cemetery.
- Even at that young age, she empathized with those who
- had gone before her.
- "I used to think people were silly for playing that
one," the
- 34-year-old recalled. [I was 33 at the time of the article
was written; I will turn 34 on March 12, 2006]
|
- Today, NIEMUTH is a self-described cemetery freak.
- NIEMUTH finds that cemeteries are peaceful backwaters
ebbing from life's main-
- stream. She admits she doesn't paddle much in the mainstream,
anyway.
- NIEMUTH, 34, maintains five Rock County and one Green
County historical and
- genalogical Web sites, along with a steam engine Web site
for good measure.
- She helps document cemeteries and offers her information
free online. If you're into
- genealogy, you know that cemeteries are important business.
- Right now, NIEMUTH is entering online more than 1,500
Milton area obituaries that
- were donated by a man who lives in Omaha, Neb. [Jon SAUNDERS].
The obits date back to the 1840s and were meticulously kept by
the Seventh Day Baptists.
- NIEMUTH lives in Utters Corners in Richmond Township
- an extinct little village that
- never became more than an intersectin. But nearby Utter's
Corners Cemetery is still active.
- "The joke around here is, 'Bury me in Utter's,' especially
because we live in the Dairy
- State," NIEMUTH said. "The spelling's not
right, but it works."
- Some people may think her fascination with cemeteries is
creepy, but for NIEMUTH
- recording their history is life-affirming.
- "I would hate to think that someone would live their
whole life and be forgotten and
- abandoned," NIEMUTH said. "Everybody in
the whole world forgot that these people [buried in the abandoned
and extinct cemeteries] even existed.
- "If you think about your life in that matter, it's a
bit frightening." [Sunday edition, p. 7A]
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