Deep in the green expanse of forest on the outskirts of Glen Arbor, pulsing cricket chirps and lively spring bird songs served as the lone backdrop to local resident Norm Wheeler’s slow and methodical rendition of taps.

The assembled crowd included local residents and township officials, historians, a uniformed emergency services crew and a pack of eighth graders from nearby Glen Lake schools.

Under the sun of an impossibly beautiful Friday morning, these people gathered to honor the veterans – at least four Civil War soldiers – buried in the small Glen Arbor Township Cemetery. The ceremony looked and unfolded as one might expect, with the crisp blue uniforms of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War popping against the late spring foliage as various speakers took their turn. 

But this ceremony, in this particular cemetery, was anything but run-of-the mill. The people there gathered to celebrate not only the veterans buried within its grounds, but a cemetery itself that until recently was almost completely lost to time (and that deep green forest).

With the efforts of several people over the past few years, the burial ground – and the memories of those interred there – lives again.

“This is a project out of love, out of honor, out of respect, out of dedication to the people in our community who came before us,” Linda Dewey, who has helped lead these efforts, tells The Ticker. “All of these people lived where we lived – they saw the islands, they saw the sand dunes, they got bitten by the same mosquitos – and they all deserve their patch of ground.”

A group of folks have gathered at the cemetery on Memorial Day for five years now, but this is the first time that most of the graves are marked with plain stone markers. Those were placed late last year after ground-penetrating radar (GPR) was used to locate bodies, the vast majority of which were likely unmarked for 100 years or more.

“We think they probably had wooden crosses originally,” Dewey says.

Township Treasurer Don Lewis and his wife Annette personally installed 67 of the stones last year. Ironically, Lewis had them in storage since a project to mark graves in Omena about 50 years ago.

“It’s probably the only time I’ve actually got public recognition for being a hoarder,” he chuckles.

It was very difficult work, installing the stones in a ground loaded with roots and rocks. Lewis, 77, quips that he worried more than once that he’d end up keeling over right there in the cemetery, fit to be buried with the rest of folks there. But with the work came a deep feeling of the importance of community and those who came before us, Lewis says.

“You’re back here, in the quiet, all by yourself, and with each stone you set you connect to the place,” he tells The Ticker. “I’m thinking about my parents, my loved ones, my friends…we wanted to make it everything a cemetery is supposed to be.”

Burials occurred at the roughly one-acre cemetery off Forest Haven Drive from 1879 until 1927. The first graves were dug for sailors killed in a shipwreck, and in subsequent decades it became the resting place for at least 120 people. 

What once was presumably a relatively open area around the cemetery grew into thick forest, and the cemetery was largely forgotten by the general public as the decades wore on. When the National Park Service (NPS) purchased the property around it as part of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore in the late 1960s, the cemetery was included in the sale.

The NPS maintained the property, though it was mostly overgrown. Adding “insult to injury,” Dewey says, the cemetery was loaded with fallen timber after the now-legendary August 2015 windstorm, rendering access nearly impossible.

Dewey, a retired teacher, found and had been visiting the site since the 1990s, and her efforts to research the cemetery increased after the storm. She worked with local historian Andrew White, who discovered that a township cemetery should never have been deeded to the NPS in the first place. With the assistance of an attorney and cooperation from both NPS and the township, cemetery ownership returned to the township in 2021.

Subsequent work by the township and volunteers helped to clear the area, while work largely by White slowly identified dozens of people buried in the cemetery. Records from the cemetery itself were lost, but White was able to piece together burials through death certificates, obituaries, and other vital records.

While ground penetrating radar found dozens of bodies, the lack of records from the cemetery itself means there are no names to go with the stones that Lewis and his wife placed. The Holy Grail, therefore, is some sort of key that ties the names and remains together.  

“We don’t have the cemetery map. All the records are lost, and we suspect they went with a family. We’re trying to get them to look into those deep, dark places where they keep their old family stuff to see if a cemetery map is there,” Dewey says. “We’re cautiously working on that front.”

For now, Dewey’s heart was warmed by the Friday gathering. The next steps can wait a little longer.

“Here's a non-political project where it doesn't matter who you're voting for or what your political stance is. Everybody in the community can get behind this project and pull together,” she says. “It’s sort of like what happens during an emergency, when suddenly something happens and everybody falls together and you get to know your neighbors again. It's a unifying cause.”

Being able to honor the veterans who lie buried there is icing on the cake, Dewey feels.

“This really helps us anchor what Memorial Day is really about,” she says.