Goths, grass clippings, gravestones: How Laurel Grove Cemetery gets ready for Memorial Day 

On a wooded, grassy plot of land with clear views of the Mohawk Valley, a settler family laid their 5-year-old son to rest. 

Since that day, 171 years ago, thousands more have been interred at Glenwood’s Laurel Grove Cemetery. Now, a small group of volunteers have spent the last few weeks preparing for graveyard Super Bowl: Memorial Day. 

When the public comes to a cemetery on Memorial Day, they step into a place that’s both a weighty symbol of loss and a real, physical place to be maintained as the centuries wear on. 

This is the busiest time of the year for an American cemetery, and there’s much to be done at Laurel Grove. Flags must be driven into hard-rock soil on veterans’ graves; grass must be mowed, clipped, and swept off the hundreds of flat headstones on the grounds. 

Laurel Grove, much like Glenwood itself between Eugene and Springfield, is the middle child of local historic cemeteries. The Eugene Pioneer Cemetery is on campus at the University of Oregon, a home for heritage roses that is stewarded by a nine-person board of directors. South of it is the Eugene Masonic Cemetery, the eternal resting place of city namesake Eugene Skinner.

This Memorial Day, the Pioneer Cemetery will welcome hundreds of people for a service. The Masonic Cemetery will host a performance of taps, scavenger hunts and tours for children and families to explore the historic graves, a free concert and more, all part of its largest outreach effort for the year. 

At Laurel Grove, Memorial Day efforts are simpler. Volunteers will be at a table, ready to help point people in the directions of where a relative’s grave might be. 

Laurel Grove, an active cemetery with more than 4,000 people buried on 12 acres, is kept tidy by a team of small, mostly elderly volunteers, a part-time landscaper — and a hopeful younger generation, starting with a store of Springfield Goths, they’ve started to welcome.

“Everybody dies,” said local historian Steve Williamson, who has been volunteering at Laurel Grove Cemetery for three decades. “Everybody deserves some kind of space to remember them. And in some way, shape, or form, unless the ashes are thrown into the ocean, you have to come back and clean up around it a couple times a year.” 

Tending to Laurel Grove

Alice Morton said she dreads Memorial Day. 

“You want it to look nice,” she said. “And you don’t want people complaining.”

Morton, 85, is the president of the nonprofit administering Laurel Grove; Williamson is her vice-president. Morton came to Laurel Grove as a mourner, when her son’s best friend from high school died by suicide after coming back from the Gulf War. 

But she’s a genealogy devotee who has traveled across the country visiting her ancestors’ graves, including Martha Carrier, killed after accusations of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. One of them is at Laurel Grove — a cousin who died in 1921 as an infant — but she’s not sure where. 

A similar, though less personal, interest motivates Williamson’s focus on Laurel Grove. His scholarly focus is the Cottage Grove writer Opal Whiteley, who became a literary star of the 1920s for her fantastical and precocious writings of life amid nature in Lane County and beyond. 

Laurel Grove has more of Whiteley’s relatives interred there than any other local cemetery; Williamson visited, then started tending to their graves; 

He’s no stranger to the macabre. He’s from Lickskillet, a small town near the Texas-Louisiana border that both states have argued over (Williamson sides with the Louisianans) and learned to read in graveyards. His grandmother, an amateur genealogist herself, would send him off with a list of names she was trying to locate. 

An older cemetery is, though respectfully treated per Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board guidelines, a playground for history-minded people. There are so many stories to find, like Willie Granville, a Black railroad worker whom a co-worker killed after a game of dice, or Jane Glendenning, a woman born in Scotland in 1838 and buried here in 1913. They haven’t been able to find her husband G.E. Glendenning, Morton said, but think he’s there too.

The biggest complaint comes when a flat headstone isn’t visible; Laurel Grove pays a modest fee to Luke Sevilla to mow the grass as a part-time landscaper. But that throws clippings on top of the flat headstones, sometimes in thick, chunky layers, that must be removed. 

“They might have a vague idea that, ‘well, Grandma’s buried someplace over there,’ and they wander around, but all the flathead stones are covered over, and they get frustrated,” Williamson said. “For most people, it’s a sacred, solemn occasion. They want to think that they know right where Grandma is.”

Sevilla is also careful to avoid the grass closest to the headstones themselves; many of the older headstones are fragile, and easily toppled over. That means each headstone is also surrounded by grass blades that must be clipped up-close by volunteers, then swept away. 

“When I sweep, I’ll sweep and sweep, but you get tired,” Morton said. “I’m 85. I get tired.”

That’s where “The Crypt Crew” comes in.

‘Our friends WOULD like to hang out in a 171 yr old graveyard!!’

Dakota Jennen, 27, owns and runs the horror- and oddity-themed store The Crypt in Springfield with her husband. 

Williamson has been a customer at The Crypt since last October, where the two have talked about classic horror movies and his volunteering at the cemetery. 

He had thought The Crypt could be a natural partner for Laurel Grove; when he had “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau-themed postcards to drop off (he used to live across the street from her grave in the French Quarter), he parceled them out to have more opportunities to stop in.

A few weeks back, Williamson dropped off a flyer requesting some help ahead of Memorial Day: “We’d like to invite you and your Crypt crew to our Work Party this Saturday the 16th from 9-12 (weather permitting). Your friends might like hanging out in a historic 171 year old graveyard.” 

Jennen posted it to The Crypt’s Instagram story: “He is right, our friends WOULD like to hang out in a 171 yr old graveyard!!” 

Williamson said he thought the Goths and alternative people of The Crypt might respond well to the call. 

“My hunch is that there’s a healthy percentage of people in the Goth community who feel alienated or estranged with their family of origin or their culture that they’re around,” he said. “They come up here and we just appreciate that. You know here, no, they ain’t gonna feel alienated in a graveyard.”

“The alienation factor comes in when you find someone that you can stick to,” added Jennen, who grew up doing picnics in the cemetery with her family before she realized it wasn’t typical. “‘You guys are all weird together, and you like weird stuff.’”

She assumed there were far more volunteers than the handful of devoted regulars. She came with an employee and some customers, who were offered an in-store discount the next time they came through. But with the extra nine people helping out, Laurel Grove ran out of brooms; Jennen ended up wearing gloves to scoop clippings into garbage bags, four bags worth, in clearing up a plot. 

More brooms (and hopefully more people) are expected for June. 

‘They’re so happy to see you.’

Visitors can be skittish walking in a cemetery. Volunteers want them to feel welcome.

Morton said seeing activity — either on the holiday, or just someone walking their dog or a young family visiting — is special. When a parent is tiptoeing around and telling their children to not walk on the graves, Morton usually interjects: “They’re so happy to see you.”

The Masonic Cemetery is technically the oldest cemetery in Eugene, incorporated the first year Oregon became a state, 1859. But even more technically, Laurel Grove was first. Five-year-old William Sweet was buried on the land that would become Laurel Grove Cemetery by his parents, Zara and Sarah Sweet, in 1855. 

To Morton, tending to the graves is a matter of recognizing the lived experience of pioneers, both people who were on the Oregon Trail and those who struggled through day-to-day life in the past. 

“What they went through to reach what they considered the promised land, we take for granted,” she said. 

For Jennen, pitching in with physical labor meant contributing to the stewardship of a local history she didn’t even know was there. “Younger people with better mobility can help,” Jennen said. “I’ve lived here for almost 20 years. This place, five minutes away from my house, I never knew it was here.”

Williamson said much of his work — as a historian, a cemetery volunteer and as a mental health counselor focused on independent living — is about justice. His own foray into personal genealogy led him to an unknown piece of family history a few years ago: he had thought he was related to a notorious killer, the Reconstruction-era outlaw Cullen Baker. 

But a DNA test uncovered his own ancestry as having multiple hidden generations of Black people passing as white around Lickskillet. That brought him both to his real great-grandfather’s resting place, and he said, to a deeper appreciation for what it means to tend to a cemetery. 

“I’m thousands of miles away from my family’s graves in rural Louisiana,” he said. “I hope that somebody down there is cleaning off graves.”

Laurel Grove Cemetery’s work parties are open to the public, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the third Saturday of each month. Complimentary coffee and doughnuts  will be served. The cemetery is located on Judkins Road, near the intersection with Glenwood Boulevard.