Right side up on history

HANCOCK COUNTY — Few remember their murders.

Fewer still know about the monument dedicated to their memories more than a century ago.

But every time Greenfield resident Tom VanDuyn thought about that monument, 12½-feet-tall and leaning terribly inside rural Cook Cemetery, it bothered him. Recently, with the help of a new friend, he got a chance to fix it.

“It was grating on me,” said VanDuyn, the vice president of the Hancock County Cemetery Commission. “This is a historic monument because of the tragedy that came with it. Fixing it’s just one of those things you have to do.”

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VanDuyn said it’s not known the exact date that the imposing monument, made of polished granite and weighing several tons, was erected. What he does know, however, is that the grisly circumstances of its creation made restoring it an even more important task.

According to county historians, on the night of June 7, 1878, 43-year-old Sarah Jane Wilson and her 6-year-old niece, Anaretta Cass, were murdered in Wilson’s home — strangled to death by a left-handed assailant. Wilson, who was recently widowed, was living alone with her niece in a farmhouse in Green Township, 2 miles east of Eden. Wilson’s brother-in-law, Steven Bales, was tried for the murders — thought to have been after the inheritance his wife, Wilson’s sister, would receive in the event of her death. However the man was acquitted due to a lack of evidence, and the case was never solved.

After their burial in Cook Cemetery, alongside Wilson’s late husband, the pair were memorialized with the impressive monument — at a sizable expense according to VanDuyn.

“I think there was a genuine rage felt in the community after this,” VanDuyn said. “And they wanted to do something to honor them.”

Placed next to the three headstones of the family members, the monument stood out among the more modest gravesites in the rural cemetery, located along County Road 400E in Green Township. Through the years, however, the monument slowly began to lean. A decorative urn that sat atop the monument eventually fell and rested on the ground at its side. It became clear, VanDuyn said, that soon the monument was in danger of toppling over entirely.

VanDuyn didn’t want to let that happen on his watch. How to go about fixing it, however, would be a challenge.

On a sunny morning in June, VanDuyn showed up at the cemetery with a railroad jack, more than a thousand pounds of concrete, and the spade he used to dig the foundation of his own home back in 1965. He was going to fix the lean himself, he thought.

But first he had to ask for permission to go on the property of the cemetery’s neighbor, Dennis Colter. When Colter, who is retired after working 40 years in the excavation industry, saw the Sisyphean feat VanDuyn was attempting to take on, he immediately offered his help.

“When Tom showed up with a truck and a shovel I thought, ‘now what do you think you’re going to be able to do,’” said Colter, who met VanDuyn for the first time that day. “He’s a kind man, and I could tell right away that he’s got a great heart. I wanted to help him.”

Fortunately for VanDuyn, the day’s task fell directly in Colter’s area of expertise. Colter used an industrial excavator to dig out around the monument down to its base, placing bags of concrete underneath it and forcing loose concrete in to stabilize the monument.

Colter said the monument had been leaning for the two decades he’s lived near the cemetery. He had noticed the matching dates of death for the pair etched into the monument, and knew that someone had been murdered in the area long ago, but didn’t know of the connection until VanDuyn filled in the blanks.

“There is some great history here,” Colter said. “A lot of people ask if it freaks me out living right next to a cemetery, and I always tell them no. It’s just people’s loved ones.”

Under the watchful eyes of Colter’s two German Shepherds, General Black Jack Pershing and Gunner, the men worked for more than six hours to restore the monument to the proud posture of its past. According to VanDuyn, being able to right one of history’s wrongs in a literal sense was a satisfying task, made possible by Colter’s kindness.

“We did this in one day,” VanDuyn said. “If it hadn’t been for him it would have taken a week, if it’d been possible at all.”

For Colter, who shies away from any credit for the good deed VanDuyn asserts he did, helping repair the monument was simply an opportunity to help give back in some small way to a community that he said has always been good to his family — a sentiment shared by VanDuyn.

“This is our township, this is our county,” VanDuyn said. “This (monument) just really touched me, and I couldn’t leave this alone.”

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Tom VanDuyn, vice president of the Hancock County Cemetery Commission, said the group is always looking for volunteers to help care for the county’s 92 pioneer cemeteries.

“And those are the ones we know about,” laughed VanDuyn, whose group receives $1,500 a year for their efforts from the county.

The group meets on the first Monday of each month, at 6:30 p.m. in the Pioneer Room of the Hancock County Public Library in Greenfield.

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