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An Eagle Scout project

Directory kiosk points cemetery visitors to gravesite locations

Photo by Jenny Kirk Marshall Boy Scout Nolan Meyer spent a year organizing, developing, guiding and completing his Eagle Scout project, which was a directory kiosk for the Marshall Cemetery located at the intersection of North Bruce Street and Boxelder Street.

MARSHALL — A directory kiosk was recently installed at the Marshall Cemetery — just in time for Memorial Day — thanks to an Eagle Scout project led by Marshall High School junior Nolan Meyer.

With more than 5,000 people buried in the cemetery, it can be a daunting task to find an individual gravesite. The new directory now assists visitors in locating an person’s final resting place.

“It means a lot to me to give people help in finding where their loved ones are buried,” said Meyer, who is part of the Marshall Boy Scouts Troop 238. “Some of them don’t know. Now when they come here, they can easily find the location in the cemetery. You can look at each name, find the block, lot and grave numbers and you can find it on the map.”

Meyer said he got the idea for the project from a friend who knew that Marshall Cemetery had been talking about doing some kind of directory.

“My friend pointed me to the cemetery and said they had a project that had been waiting to be done for awhile, so I asked them what it was and then jumped on it,” he said.

Marshall Cemetery Board President Paul Bridgland and Secretary-Treasurer Lyle Moseng said they were grateful for Nolan’s effort.

“We’ve talked about this for years, and we’ve never gotten it started,” Moseng said. “Nolan came up last year and asked if there was an Eagle Scout project he could work on and we suggested this directory kiosk. And he did an excellent job. Everything is perfect.”

The board members said they had a rough idea of what they were looking for, but that the project evolved into something even better.

“We kind of knew what we wanted in terms of information, and we worked with him,” Bridgland said. “But then he took it from there. He found volunteers for all the labor and money put toward it.”

One of the major elements for the Eagle Scout project was for Meyer to lead.

“That’s really my role in the project,” Meyer said. “I’m the leader of anything that goes on. I’ll give people directions to do things, though I helped do a lot of things, too. It’s been a great learning experience for sure.”

The year-long effort has been kind of like a labor of love for Meyer and those who have helped along the way.

“I’ve been working on it — planning it, working with them on what suggestions they have and then getting my own models together and coming back to them with those ideas,” Meyer said. “Everything was a challenge — or I guess you could say an adventure.”

Along with lining up people to help build the structure that encases the directory, Meyer also had to contact businesses in order to purchase products and services.

“The plexiglass and wood came from Ace,” he said. “The steel frame came from Bend-Rite. I had to get different bids, decide who we were going with and schedule meetings. We started the concrete work in the fall and we did the frames during the winter. We put most everything else in this spring.”

The heavy snowfall that took place in April pushed the project back, but it ended up working out just fine.

“Our goal was to have it completed by May 1, but because of the winter and spring, we got set back a few weeks,” Moseng said. “We were fortunate to get the steel poles set up before winter set in.”

With a roof overhead and everything set in concrete, the directory kiosk should last a long time.

“I’ve really received a lot of support from the Marshall Cemetery Board and different companies that were willing to donate because it’s such a beneficial project,” Meyer said. “It will be here for a long time now. That’s really what kept me on this project, is how beneficial it is for the community.”

When asked how many hours he likely logged throughout the process, Meyer said, “A lot.”

“I was in charge of getting people to come out and help,” he said. “I had to see how many people were needed for the day so people weren’t standing around. I logged down the hours of how much time was put in, but I haven’t added it up yet. It’s a lot. But I’m very glad that I did the project. It was worth it.”

Among the many things Meyer learned during his Eagle Scout project was the importance of perseverance and communication.

“I learned about adjusting when you make a mistake,” Meyer said. “When you cut something 5 centimeters short, you need to adjust around it. And communication and leadership is so important.”

Along with the directory of names for everyone buried in the cemetery, there is an area that highlights some interesting people who are buried there. Among them are war veterans from the area, the oldest person known to be buried in the cemetery and a family who lost five children in the span of 15 days due to scarlet fever.

“We have all this history that we listed up here, along with the maps and names of the people buried here,” Meyer said. “I learned a lot of interesting things. (The cemetery is) really a beautiful place.”

The Marshall Cemetery, a private, nonprofit cemetery with a volunteer board, anticipates computerizing the names sometime in the future, but that will take another massive effort.

“The official records go back to 1871 and they’re all hand-written in these big ledger books,” Bridgland said. “Lyle keeps track of that. We’re in the process of trying to create a website — we have a board member who moved away but is still working on that.”

Bridgland added that the new directory kiosk has already drawn a lot of attention.

“As it’s went up, we’ve had a lot of questions and a lot of really positive comments about the need and appreciation for it,” he said. “We feel it’s a really great addition to the cemetery.”

As more burials take place — the cemetery is nondenominational and open to the public — the directory will need to be continuously updated.

“We get about 40-50 people a year,” Bridgland said. “So we figure in five year’s time, we’ll have added about 225-250 people.”

Meyer said there will be a separate list printed out and put up in the directory kiosk for recently-buried individuals.

“We’ll just have a board that is for like one year,” he said. “They’ll replace it every month. It’ll say like 2019 and have the names under each one. Then the other ones (the full directory of names) will be replaced every five years.”

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