05-04-2025
Reber Cemetery hosts first Caring for Your Cemetery Day April 25
REBER — 'Caring For Your Cemetery Day' will be observed Saturday, April 26, starting at 10 a.m. at the Reber Cemetery located at 239 Reber Rd.
'We're a small town. We don't have a store. We have a church, and we have a fire department. Anybody will be able to find the cemetery,' Carol Dickerson, secretary/treasurer of the Reber Cemetery Association, said.
'I've been with the cemetery probably since the '60s. The State Division of Cemeteries recommended that we have a Caring For Your Cemetery Day. We're opening up the cemetery and the trustees, president, vice president and myself will be there cleaning up of the cemetery. It dates back to the early 1800s. Way back in the 1800s when people first passed away, they needed a place to be buried and that's probably how it got formed. I don't know that exactly. I know it's all Reber people. The names I can recognize way back.'
In 2024, the Essex cemetery received $20,288.71 from the state to repair 19 dangerous monuments.
'The Division of Cemeteries has a vandalism fund and you can do an application for them to come, I call it, shore up the old stones that are starting to maybe be a hazard to fall over or something like that,' Dickerson said.
'We did that work this past fall. You had to have bids. Then, they come in and fix those stones. We had 19 of them done last fall.'
This is the first Cemetery Day hosted by the association.
'Apparently last year, the State Division of Cemeteries started this, and then they started trying to extend it out to get more cemeteries to try to do this. We always just had the local people clean it up, and the person that mows the cemetery cleans it up. A lot of them tend to their own family stones and clean them up. Our cemetery always looks very nice. We're always very proud of our cemetery.'
