Girls make cemetery cleanup annual event
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[HARRISBURG -- Modern Woodmen of America recognized the work of five girls Thursday who have made a cemetery cleanup an annual tradition since some of them were just in first grade.
Members of the MWA Youth Service Club who are also members of Girl Scout Troop 8268 spent the morning putting flags on graves at Ledford Cemetery and brushing grass off graves at Sunset Lawn Cemetery in Harrisburg. Most of them will start their junior year in high school in August.
The girls started out as Girl Scouts in kindergarten and their leader Mary Rivera wanted a simple service project that the girls could do even at that age that would also connect them with the community's heritage.
"We looked at the tombstones and [decided to] help clean the cemetery," Rivera recalled.
Misti Spear won the 2012 Outstanding Junior Volunteer award and her fellow service members Morgan Evans, Parker Upchurch, Addison Upchurch and Tori Carey received runners up medals.
Gerald Mahan, Harrisburg's cemetery superintendent recalled how small the girls were when they first started, recalling the short brooms he found for them to use.
Mayor Eric Gregg attended the presentation as well and complimented the girls for their positive impact in the cemetery referencing some of the non-so-positive antics pulled in the cemetery by teenagers in his day, antics he may have taken in part himself.
Besides brushing off the tombstones the girls have also adopted some of stones in the older part of the cemetery to decorate with homemade flower arrangements.
For years Evans had picked the large Pierson family tombstone.
"I've had this once since we started doing this. I like it because of the claws," she said pointing to the details around its base.
The marker has a stone bouquet of flowers on the west side and a saying Evans like on the reverse, "Death is eternal life. Why should we weep?"
Addison Upchurch has only been decorating a grave for three years. She picked the large marker for Catharine and Pleasant Taylor. She said she didn't know why she picked it though it's reddish color may have had something to do with it. The coloration proves a sharp contrast to the gray and white stones surrounding it.
"I don't know really anything about them, I just like the grave," she said.
For her information Pleasant Taylor lost an arm in the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War fighting in the 31st Illinois Infantry Regiment first organized by John A. Logan. His son Harry served as the long-time principal of Harrisburg High School until his death in 1948.
Addison's sister Parker Upchurch likes reading the tombstones for the hints of history they often give, though few provide as much detail as the huge Skaggs marker which lists the offices and organizations to which Charles P. Skaggs belonged on one side and Frank P. Skaggs on the other.
"I just read the dates of someone down there," she said, "who lived to be a hundred.
Parker noted that the service projects offer a chance to recruit friends to come and help.
"That's how we get a lot of this done," she explained. "We say, 'Hey, we're about to go do this, you want to come?'"
"They say, 'well, no,'" she said, "Well, you're coming."
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Musgrave receives e-mail at jmusgrave@dailyregister.com</li>
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