The November 13, 1978 Golden Transcript featured an interview with Arthur Meinecke, who had been serving as sexton (caretaker) of the Golden Cemetery for 26 years. He was responsible for selling plots, digging and refilling graves, setting up for funerals, maintaining the landscaping in summer and plowing the roads in winter.
That summer, he had experienced a cement shortage. At one point he had 12 headstones to set and no concrete to set them in. Shortly after he solved the cement problem, vandals struck the cemetery. Two local kids tipped over 14 headstones. Mr. Meinecke had just set up chairs for a funeral and the youths threw the chairs into the open grave. Fortunately, a visitor to the cemetery spotted the vandals and alerted the sexton. He called the police, who arrived quickly and caught them in the act. In November, they were still making restitution payments.
As of 46 years ago, there were about 5,000 people buried in the cemetery and there was room for about 11,300 more. There were four sections in the cemetery. The county owned a “pauper section,” where destitute people were buried without charge. There was also a veterans section, an Oddfellows section, and a section that had originally belonged to the Masons but which had been turned over to the city.
The city had purchased a backhoe for digging graves in 1957. Prior to that, Meinecke had dug them by hand. When the ground was frozen or the clay soil was particularly hard, he had sometimes used as many as a dozen sticks of dynamite to loosen the soil prior to digging.
The costs in 1978 were as follows:
Grave space: $275
Perpetual care: $75
Grave opening and closing: $100
Today’s costs (according to the City's cemetery page) are:
Grave space: $1980 (resident) – $2640 (non-resident)
Perpetual care: $595 (resident) – $800 (non-resident)
Adult grave opening and closing: $1780 (resident) – $1780 (non-resident)
Many thanks to an anonymous donor for sponsoring Golden History Moments for the month of October.
