As the board of directors for Evergreen Cemetery stood talking by the road that snakes through its rolling acres on a recent summer day, a woman pulled in and rolled down her window to tell them how great the place looked.
It’s not an infrequent occurrence — both to see the board members roaming the cemetery’s grounds, and for them to receive compliments as they do it.
That is, in part, because until last August, the Caribou cemetery had not had a board for 55 years. Its sexton — the person responsible for managing the property — had done so mostly by himself since the late 1980s, but he was ready to retire. The grass was growing a little too tall. The entrance sign was worn down.
Evergreen needed a facelift. Its new board made it happen.
“People love what’s going on. They’re really happy to see somebody paying attention,” cemetery president and co-clerk Karla Bell said. “It wasn’t that John [Somers, the former sexton] didn’t pay attention, he was just too busy for one person.”
The problem the 17-acre Evergreen Cemetery faced echoes that occurring in cemeteries across Maine, where an aging population of caretakers and a slim crop of replacements has created a Sisyphean task for cemetery boards and towns.
Steven Libby, president of the Maine Cemetery Association, said he often gets calls from groups that are struggling to find a sexton.
“It’s usually exactly what’s happened in Caribou, that the sexton’s been doing it for 40 years and wants to retire and they can’t find someone,” Libby said.
What’s less common is how Caribou responded.
Penny Thompson, the city manager, led a public effort last summer to advertise the cemetery corporation’s first meeting in half a century, posting to social media and discussing it at city council meetings.
Her motives were twofold. Thompson did not want the financial responsibility for the cemetery’s perpetual care to fall on taxpayers, she said. But it was also personal: many members of her husband’s family are buried there and Thompson herself has a plot there, she told the city council.
“This past weekend, while driving through the cemetery, Dana observed that it has never looked better,” Thompson said Thursday of her husband.
The corporation needed at least 17 members — those with plots at the cemetery or immediate family buried there — to attend the meeting to reach the quorum necessary to elect a new board that could officially replace the sexton.
More than 30 people showed up, most of whom were members, several of the cemetery directors recalled.
“I came to that meeting because I wanted to complain about the mowing,” said Thomas Whitten, who said he has family in Evergreen. He left the meeting as the cemetery’s treasurer.
Whitten is joined on the board by Bell; Rhonda Rose, the vice president and co-clerk; Thompson; and Hannah Holmes, the recently appointed secretary.
Bell estimated that the board members have each spent hundreds of hours working to rejuvenate the historic property, which has been a cemetery since the mid-1800s.
They have reorganized the cemetery bylaws — which have been unchanged since the corporation set up for its management was established in 1960 — straightened headstones, replaced and added signs, repaired roads and ditches and restored a storage building with the help of a local contractor. Some of the directors have trash bags and water jugs permanently in their cars, ready to pick up trash or water flowers on their frequent drives through the cemetery.
“Thomas and Rhonda and I, one of us is here every day, or all of us, just making sure,” Bell said. “I think we all take enormous pride in the cemetery. It’s amazing how you get attached to a property. And we are.”
Evergreen Cemetery is among the largest in northern Maine. More than 5,000 people are buried there, including some of Caribou’s most prominent residents. Dr. Jefferson Cary, the namesake and founder of Caribou’s Cary Medical Center, rests at Evergreen. So do family members of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and more than 500 veterans, some dating back to the civil war.
“This is kind of an icon in town,” Bell said.
But the community support found in Caribou is not shared by many other Maine places that have grappled with what to do once a sexton steps down.
In some towns, the responsibility of managing cemeteries has fallen to the public works director or other municipal employees, Libby said. In other areas, one person manages several regional cemeteries because there is no one else to do it.
“At our annual conference two years ago, there was a gentleman from northwestern Maine and he worked with the county because there was all these towns had no sextons,” Libby said. “He was running all over northern Oxford County handling the sexton’s responsibilities and he was 100% volunteer.”
Like many other professions facing workforce shortages, the problem comes down to a wide gap between the number of cemetery caretakers aging into retirement and members of younger generations that are stepping into it.
“Thinking of the towns that are active in the Maine Cemetery Association, I’m young and I’m in my early 60s,” said Libby, who is also the sexton for the New Gloucester Cemetery Association. “There’s no really young people getting involved.”
In cemetery work, that issue is amplified by the fact that the roles pay little or are volunteer. Volunteerism rates in the U.S. have rebounded after a marked dip related to the pandemic, but Americans overall are spending fewer hours volunteering, research from the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps found.
Libby believes many people also hold misconceptions about what the job entails.
“I think people assume that it’s a very difficult technical position. It’s not,” he said. “It’s very time consuming. You have to be a people person.”
But that effort, he and the new board members of Evergreen Cemetery insist, is worth it to honor the dead and maintain a space important to many in a community.
“So many people [think of] funerals and cemeteries as if it’s something they don’t want to look at .. that is sad,” Libby said. “How towns take care of the cemeteries is a reflection of the town, and we go to a great extent to make our cemetery as close to perfect as possible.”
