What’s under there? Marengo sexton launches project to search for graves with no markers

Before Jennifer Stevens and her husband retired in Marengo, she didn’t know what a sexton was.

But in an effort to stay busy, she quickly got involved in town activities. Last year the board asked her if she could digitize all of the records related to Maple Grove Cemetery.

Though there have bee many sextons over the last 110 years, she said the records are “amazingly complete and detailed.” But while going through the records, she discovered that Maple Grove has graves with no markers.

Many of these plots have visible indentations in the ground surface due to settling of graves over time. The northeast quarter of Maple Grove, however, remains mostly unsold, so she feels it is reasonable to assume the surface of the ground in this area would be less disturbed. But, similar to the indentations of the known unmarked graves in the older sections, she said there does seem to be variation in the texture of the ground surface.

“For this reason, there is concern that there are burials in the unmarked and unsold areas of the Maple Grove Cemetery,” Stevens said.

To get answers she partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Department of Archeology to develop a plan to research and determine what may be causing the variation in the surface of the northeast corner of the cemetery.

Graduate student Crystal Morgan jumped on the opportunity to be part of the project.

“It seemed like a really interesting project. Originally it was supposed to be a thing to satisfy a class. I have decided to use it as my master’s thesis and wanted to be able to give back to the town and the cemetery,” she said earlier this month while working on the project.

She was working alongside Bill Quackenbush, the Ho-Chunk Tribal Historic Society preservation officer. He was brought into the project to do ground penetrating radar work.

Quackenbush pushed a transmitter that looked like a lawn mower that sent radar waves into the soil to a depth of six to eight feet below the surface. The waves bounce off material it encounters and create a reading that displays those bounces, he said.

That’s just is one of several testing methods Morgan plans to use as part of her thesis. Earlier in May, Morgan recruited Mary De La Garza from the University of Iowa to use a drone and capture light detection and ranging and thermal imagining data. They are still collecting the data and will analyze it in the coming days. They hope it determines if there really is something more than sand, gravel and roots beneath the surface of the remaining unsold area of the cemetery.

“The more data we can obtain under the various testing methods which confirm the same conclusion provides a higher confidence that the next steps for the town are correct,” Stevens said.