Saturday, April 20, 2024 | St. Lawrence County, NY
By CRAIG FREILICH POTSDAM – The roughly 50 people who attended last night’s meeting of the St. Mary’s Cemetery Committee persuaded the committee to hold in abeyance for a year its regulations …
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By CRAIG FREILICH
POTSDAM – The roughly 50 people who attended last night’s meeting of the St. Mary’s Cemetery Committee persuaded the committee to hold in abeyance for a year its regulations regarding decorations.
The visitors to the committee meeting were there to protest what they saw as the draconian steps volunteers took, under committee direction, to remove decorations and memorial installations at graves in the cemetery last weekend.
“There will be a moratorium for one year if they would give us three representatives to the committee for their input,” said St. Mary’s Sexton William Simmons. “Together we’ll decide what to do a year from now.”
Simmons said most of the difficulty the committee was having in precisely delineating the cemetery plots was due to “plantings and curbings put around gravestones” that were causing incursions into neighboring plots.
The ire of the people complaining about the removal of objects they had placed at loved ones’ graves was apparent yesterday as the story found its way around the community, inspiring outrage among some people.
The complaints were not only about the removals of plants, curbing stones, statuettes, photos, flags and many other items, but also about the lack of notice people got that the action to remove those items would be taken.
Simmons said he felt there were a couple of positive developments arising out of the action over the weekend and at Monday night’s meeting.
Speaking about his attempts before the removals to get plot owners and heirs to take responsibility for the unauthorized placements, Simmons said he told the meeting attendees, “We got your attention, which I haven’t been able to do in the past year, and we got some people to volunteer to help us choose what has to be done.”
“I feel better about what we’ve done,” he said Tuesday. “The aim in the first place was to make the cemetery a better place, and I think we can do that.
“I certainly hope we’re on the right track here,” he said. “That’s my prayer, and I think that’s how it’s going to work.”
