How mowing grass led to the rebirth of a pair of 180

WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI - It began with mowing the grass.

When Dexter Township hired a new landscaper to care for two historic cemeteries dating back to the earliest days of European settlement in Washtenaw County, he began to make discoveries. Mowing the burial sites dating back to the 1830s and ‘40s, he began to find little bits of stone poking up in the grass.

The landscaper, Kim Beck with KB Services, refused to mow over them. A little bit of digging revealed they were headstones, swallowed by the earth.

“He took me over there and showed me, and I went oh lord, we got to do something about these because they were in bad shape,” said Dexter Township Trustee Karen Nolte.

Months later and a group of volunteers she’s led are well on their way to bringing new life to the plots marking the death of the earliest township residents at the Hudson Mills Cemetery, off Dexter-Pinckney Road near township hall, and Four Mile Cemetery, on Lima Center Road in western Washtenaw County near Dexter.

The township contracted with tree trimmers to clear back brush, and found even more headstones underneath. Beck has uncovered approximately 35 since he began mowing, some underground and others lying down in the brush or propped up against fences, according to Nolte.

“We’re still finding headstones in the dirt,” she said.

The township trustee reached out to a historic preservationist specializing in cemeteries and learned how to restore the stones, with a paste solution scrubbed on with small brushes, putty knives and a healthy dose of elbow grease. She’s trained a group of volunteers to tackle the task, touching up the headstones and preventing mold and mildew.

Headstone restoration at Hudson Mills Cemetery in Dexter Township, Michigan, on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. Christina Merrill | MLive.comChristina Merrill | MLive.com

The landscaper has also found fragments of some of the markers and pieced them together. The volunteers will receive training in how to rebuild them, since using concrete isn’t recommended, Nolte said.

Then, there’s the matter of where the headstones go. Some are knocked over or teetering thanks to the growth of nearby trees.

Nolte said she found a listing of names from a local historical society, but layout information isn’t a part of it. The volunteers do have one resource to go on, she said, in the form of a 2009 Eagle Scout project.

At that time, Mark Anderson, a member of Boy Scout Troop 477 in Dexter, completed a survey of the Hudson Mills Cemetery, separating the property out into a grid and cataloging the monuments and their locations, dimensions and inscriptions, square by square.

Of the roughly 150 markers, some date back to the 1840s, 50s and 60s, many for residents of the Hudson Mills settlement, which grew out of a Huron River sawmill built in the 1820s.

“Death is a debt to nature due. Which I have paid and so must you,” reads one of the tablets.

It marks the resting place of Lydia Dudley, the four-month-old daughter of David and Betsey Dudley, who sold over an acre of their farmland to Dexter Township in 1841 for the burial ground, according to a historical marker.

The cemeteries are still meaningful to some of the descendants of those buried there.

Last year, Nolte said, the township received a letter from a Pennsylvania resident thanking officials for their upkeep of the Four Mile Cemetery, where her second great grandparents were buried.

The note only further cemented the push to clean up the grave sites, Nolte said, and the township established a small budget to do so.

“We started this project in respect of those that came and settled our community prior, and we believe the years of neglect was disrespectful to them,” she wrote in a recent township newsletter. “We are working to improve on those years of neglect and the project continues to evolve and grow with each stone uncovered.”

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