One part community project, one part history remembrance, one part mystery and one part social studies subject. The historic Glen Arbor Cemetery is all these and more.

“I found it in 1991. It was a little area with 13 headstones,” says Linda Dewey. She would visit occasionally, mesmerized by the area’s serenity – until the devastation of the windstorm of 2015. She’s since turned her interest into a mission of restoring the site and rediscovering the identities of those buried there, many of which are unmarked.

The story actually begins in the late 19th century, when an acre of land off what was then called Day Forest Road was deeded to the township by Dr. William Walker to serve as a cemetery. It was then the main route from Big Glen Lake through the stone gates at M-22 and Forest Haven Road, to the stone gates at M-109. The road then ran straight down to the Glen Arbor dock.

The first graves in the cemetery were dug in 1879 for sailors who were killed in a shipwreck; the last in 1927. Others making it their final resting place include Civil War veterans, infants and many local residents.

Over the years, the cemetery was all but forgotten by the public, and by the 1960s the township ceased maintenance there. When the National Park Sevice (NPS) purchased the property around it as part of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, the cemetery was included in the sale.

The NPS maintained the property and what was now little more than a trail leading to it, up until the devastating windstorm of 2015. Thousands of trees littered the ground throughout the park. When Dewey notified the park in 2017 that the cemetery was still nearly impossible to get to and was still littered with downed trees, she was told it was a lower priority.

That’s when she ran into Parshall Tree Service, which was working at Tobin Cemetery. “They offered to clear an opening for free,” she says, enabling people to get to the cemetery. The project moved ahead with the blessing of the National Park.

She also contacted Andrew White, a historian who lives in Traverse City but is interested in and researches the history of the Glen Arbor and Port Oneida areas. “I’d been back there three springs ago and became interested,” he says.

He soon realized that the sale of the property to the federal government never should have taken place. “I was the first to ask how this came about. Townships don’t sell cemeteries,” he says. He told Dewey that cemeteries are always excluded from land transactions, meaning it should never have been deeded to the National Lakeshore.

That’s when things got moving; with the assistance of an attorney and cooperation from both the NPS and the township, ownership of the property reverted back to Glen Arbor Township last year. Making things more interesting (read: challenging), all the records for the cemetery had been lost, so there was no record of who all was buried there.

Dewey, a retired teacher, was subbing one day at Glen Lake Community Schools and had lunch with Melissa Okerlund, a middle and high school social studies teacher. Their conversation turned to the cemetery, and they realized they could help one another. “We started talking about the people there [and] when it operated. It fit with the curriculum of 8th grade American history quite nicely,” says Okerlund.

She saw how having students look into the history of the cemetery and those who were buried there could help fill in the blanks from the missing records, while providing the students a research project directly connected to their community.

That was about when the pandemic interrupted everything, but Neither Okerlund nor Dewey gave up on the project. Students continued to do research on their own. Dewey continued to advocate for cleanup of the site, and eventually became chair of the township’s Cemetery Advisory Board.

Just recently, Deering’s Tree Service cleared the little-known cemetery site of more brush and trees, and Okerlund’s current students finally got to visit the site in April. She says that helped build enthusiasm for their research into the people and what the area was like during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The field trip was really a kickoff,” Okerlund says, of what Dewey affectionately refers to as their adopt-a-grave project. Furthering their interest and research: trips to the Empire Area Museum and Leelanau Historical Society Museum in Leland.

Dewey shares with the Leelanau Ticker some of the individuals known to be buried in the cemetery: Glenn Burgess, age 7, who was shot by his brother; Robert Dowey and Frank Golden, both victims of a horrific shipwreck in 1879; several members of the Fisher family; 15-day-old Helen Ehle, whose mother immigrated from Norway; Kate Trumbull Jensen, who died at age 24 just after giving birth to a daughter; William Knickerbocker, who was murdered by his lover's husband; and Nels Oleson, clerk for a company store whose descendants live in this area.

What’s next for the cemetery? Dewey says later this year they will use ground penetrating radar in an attempt to locate unmarked graves. White’s research shows that at least 49 people are buried there, four of whom are Civil War veterans.

On May 27, the third annual Memorial Ceremony will take place at the cemetery at 10am, kicking off Memorial Day Weekend. “We will learn about Civil War veteran Daniel Parker in a grave dedication led by John Sawyer of Traverse City's Robert Finch Camp of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War,” Dewey says. 

Pictured: Linda Dewey with Glen Lake 8th grade history students, as they prepare to adopt a gravesite and research the individual buried there. Photo by Susan Johnson.

Editors Note: a previous version of this story indicatd that Linda Dewey had retired from Glen Lake Community Schools; she worked at another district and subbed at Glen Lake.