On a small piece of land steps from a condominium and tennis courts in Oakland Mills in Howard County lies the grave of Eleanor A. Cooke, born 1795.
More than 150 years after her death, her headstone leans precariously, weeds sprouting around it. Nearby headstones lie broken on the ground.
“Over the years, it hasn?t been well-maintained,” said Kevin Balon, a Columbia resident whose son, John, adopted the site as a Boy Scout project.
Small cemeteries ? some with a few headstones ? dot the former farmlands around Howard and the state. Laws aim to keep the plots from being destroyed, but who is responsible for maintaining them is less clear, officials said.
Now, many are overgrown or deteriorating.
“Most people in the community don?t even know they are there,” said Patti Petry, a member of the Harper?s Choice Village Board, which has taken an interest in a small cemetery near Eliot?s Oak and Harper?s Farm roads.
The board is considering working with the Boy Scouts to clean up the area and research the story behind the headstones, she said.
“As Columbia grows, I think it?s interesting to know more about [the] history,” Petry said.
Land owners often buried family members on their land rather than pay for the town cemetery, said Barbara Sieg, who helped found the Coalition to Protect Maryland Burial Sites Inc. The land is laterdivided and sold, and often the name of the owner is lost along the way.
State laws prohibit developers from building on top of a graveyard. However, plots are destroyed and hundreds disappear every year because of loopholes, Sieg said.
At the Cooke family cemetery in Columbia, John Balon, 15, landscaped the area, removing a tree and putting a border around it. He is looking for funding to restore the broken tombstones, Kevin Balon said.
But finding a group to take care of long-term maintenance is often the catch in cemetery preservation.
“Who?s going to do it year after year ? that?s the hard part,” Sieg said.
