Chip Colton (left) President of the Friends of Pine Hill Cemetery, and Dale Dickson (right) Superintendent of Pine Hill Cemetery. (Photo submitted)
WESTFIELD- The Friends of Pine Hill Cemetery are seeking donations and volunteers to help maintain the cemetery on Court Street.
Pine Hill Cemetery, which was founded as a non-profit in 1842, is suffering from the effects of rising expenses and lowering revenue.
“Expenses have increased while sales (of plots) have gone down due to more people deciding to be cremated rather than buried,” said Chip Colton, President of The Friends of Pine Hill Cemetery.
Colton said that when the cemetery first opened, the cost of a burial plot was $10. The money was divided in half with five dollars going to a perpetual care fund and the other five dollars going to operating costs. All interest earned from the money would go into the operations fund.
“It worked fine for 160 years,” said Colton, “The price of a plot is now somewhere around $300. Interest rates have gone down to historical lows as well.”
As a response to the low funding, a 501 (c) (3) was created last year in the form of The Friends of Pine Hill Cemetery. The friends operate as a fundraising arm of the cemetery. Colton has been a board member for the cemetery since 1975. He resigned from that position when he was selected as President of the friends.
“We have been given a challenge,” said Colton, “whatever money we can raise will be matched by an anonymous donor.”
The donor offered to match all donations made to the cemetery within the next year. Colton said that volunteer work hours would also be matched with a cash donation that reflects the time spent helping to maintain and fix some parts of the cemetery.
The friends will be hosting a holiday reception at The Tavern on Dec. 13th. The event will be open to the public and is meant to teach residents about the history of the cemetery and spread awareness about the drive for donations and volunteers.
The cemetery often hosts stone cleaning days. Volunteers will come to the cemetery and clean the older worn-down headstones with D2, a substance that removes biological growth and stains from the stone. The most recent cleanup was shortly before Veteran’s Day.
“They were up here for six or seven hours that day,” said Colton, “We had five or six people. All together that added about $400 to the anonymous matching fund.”
Colton said his goal is to put half of the donations into the perpetual care fund and the other half into special repair projects. Possible projects include repairing the fencing, managing trees that have encroached on existing grave sites, and repairing the leak in the roof of the chapel.
People drive by here every day and don’t give us a thought,” said Colton, “We need help building up our preservation fund so that the cemetery can exist for another 175 years.”
Pine Hill Cemetery is a non-denominational cemetery. It is not associated with any church or religion, meaning that anybody can be buried there.
