Over 150 Unmarked Graves Discovered at Plymouth Cemetery This Week

The removal of weeds and debris from a badly overgrown section in the northwest corner of the 1873-vintage burial ground brought to light 150 or so unmarked graves. The question is, whose are they?

"When we cleared back here, we just found hundreds of them," Shawnee Cemetery Preservation Association President Tom Jesso said. For the past two years Jesso, his wife, Ruth, and an assortment of volunteers have sweated to tame the wilderness that had encroached on the neglected cemetery grounds to the point where parts of it were dense with waist-high vegetation. It's personal for Tom: several generations of his family are buried in the cemetery. On Thursday, Tom Jesso took advantage of the warm, sunny weather to mow grass with one of the association's most dedicated volunteers, Henry Sobolewski. Jesso stopped his work long enough to give a tour of the newly reclaimed section. Among the rampant blue vinca and day lilies - possibly long-ago floral tributes now gone wild - there are rows of indentations in the ground, caused as the pine boxes people were buried in gradually rotted, Jesso said."This is the only way you would know they were here," he said, indicating the depressions. Some of the graves are completely unmarked. Some have plain stones on them, the inscriptions - if there ever were any - long since eroded away. And some have round metal markers bearing only a number. A few of these came to light still half-buried in the ground after the area was cleared. Tom and Ruth Jesso discovered more underground while probing with a metal detector. The numbers run from 1 to 300, but don't seem to be in order.

Ruth Jesso spray-painted the markers silver to be more visible. Tom Jesso put small American flags on some of the anonymous graves that didn't have markers. "I have 50 flags in here now, and there probably should be three times as many," he said. The Jessos hope someone will donate wooden crosses or some other kind of marker for the graves. And that the origins of the metal markers will come to light. Members of the Plymouth Historical Society say the section of the cemetery was where victims of an epidemic, probably typhoid, were buried. READ MORE