‘The old ones are gone, and the young ones don’t care’.....Like many old cemeteries here,this one needs more support

Mike Welch loves the old Welch Cemetery, off County Road 910 near Pond Fork, where his great-grandfather, Civil War veteran William Edward Welch, was buried in 1922 at age 79. Mike has lots of other relatives buried there as well, and he wants the cemetery to continue being a place where families gather to remember and honor their loved ones.

But time is working against him. 

Like other old, hidden-away cemeteries in Ozark County and elsewhere, the Welch Cemetery’s support system is shrinking as the tradition of visiting cemeteries and “decorating” graves, especially around Memorial Day, seems to be fading away. Donations for cemetery upkeep are declining too. Kay Stockton, treasurer on the Welch Cemetery’s board of directors, has watched that trend happen. “The old ones are gone, and the young ones don’t care,” she said in a 2022 interview with the Times for a story about another cemetery that’s seeing reduced support.

As treasurer, Kay keeps the books for the Welch Cemetery, collects donations – when there are any – and arranges for keeping the cemetery mowed. She took over the treasurer’s job in 2022 when Dora Jo Marsh Burnett Simmons retired from the role, which she had created and served in since 1995. Dora Jo has lots of close relatives buried in the Welch Cemetery; Kay has only a few cousins. But she accepted the unpaid treasurer’s job anyway “because no one else would,” she said. 

Besides the Welches and Stones, others buried at the Welch Cemetery include members of the Marsh, Adams, Maritt/Merritt, Barnett, Brown, Copelin, Garoutte, Graves, Gray, Herd, Humbyrd, Ledford, Mahan, Melton, Peacock, Robertson, Sallee, Shockey, Swearingen and Walker families. 

The Welch Cemetery’s board holds annual meetings – at least it used to. Kay Stockton said that, soon after she took on the treasurer’s job, she followed Dora Jo’s practice of putting a notice in the Times about that year’s annual meeting. Then she and another board member carried lawn chairs to the cemetery at the scheduled meeting time, “and we sat there and sat there, and no one came,” she said.   

 Last year, she said, the Welch Cemetery account at Century Bank of the Ozarks received only one donation. It’s a concern, she said, because keeping the cemetery mowed costs around $700 a year, and the cemetery’s existing funds won’t last much longer.

Trying to build interest and generate support

Mike Welch has put in memorial stones for several Welches whose burial sites are unknown. And he’s tried to help build interest and generate support for the cemetery by writing stories and creating events that attract people who have family members buried there. A retired journalist, now 76 and living near Hutchinson, Kansas, where he grew up, he organized a clean-up workday and business meeting at the cemetery in May 2013. To promote the clean-up and appeal for donations, Mike wrote a story for the Times telling the tragic story of the cemetery’s first burial – a young boy, the son of pioneer Billy Stone, “so small he still wore a dress” who drowned in Pond Fork Creek. 

The exact date of the boy’s death and burial isn’t known, but historical records say the event happened several years before the Civil War; Mike believes it was in the 1840s. The Stone child is generally acknowledged as the first burial in what is now the Welch Cemetery but, in his 2013 story, Mike wrote, “Several other Welches from the Pond Fork area are known to have died before that and also may be interred there in unmarked graves.” 

Local lore suggests that even earlier, unmarked graves in the cemetery may be those of Native Americans.

At the time of the 2013 workday, the cemetery had 61 headstones, but “at least 22 more people” were believed to be buried there in unmarked graves, Mike said. Later that year, he organized a reunion and “rededication” of the cemetery. More than 80 people attended. The event included a Cherokee ceremony and a multi-gun salute by Civil War re-enactors. 

In 2015, Mike organized a day of “grave witching,” or “dousing” led by Leslie Wyman, director of the White River Valley Historical Society. The effort identified an astonishing 268 unmarked graves in two-thirds of the 90’ x 150’ cemetery. (The rest of the cemetery was to be doused another day.) His story in the Times about the event also announced that year’s annual meeting would be held in September. 

Because of health issues and the long drive necessary to get here, Mike is no longer able to organize and attend cemetery events, but he asked the Times to tell the story of the 180-plus-year-old cemetery around the Memorial Day holiday and pass along the board’s urgent request for donations. The timing is personal for him, he said, because this is the 200th anniversary of his Welch ancestors’ arrival in Ozark County in 1825 after traveling here from their previous homestead in Indiana. 

Confederate and Union graves

During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate sympathizers lived in the Pond Fork area, and both Confederate and Union veterans and family members are buried in the Welch Cemetery. Sue Gray Robirds, now 89 and president of the cemetery board, said her sister, who is 10 years older than Sue, recalled going to dinner on the grounds for Decoration Day at the cemetery when she was little. “She remembers seeing a Confederate family sitting on one side and the Union family sitting on the other,” Sue said. 

Sue’s great-grandfather Isaac Fletcher Gray is one of the Union soldiers buried in the Welch Cemetery. “He went to the Civil War and got dysentery, and they sent him home to die,” Sue said. “But he got over it and went back!”

Isaac died in 1885. Like Mike’s Union soldier great-grandfather Welch, who died in 1922, Isaac Gray’s grave is marked by a Union headstone carrying his Army rank and company. The confederate graves are unmarked.

The snakes are gone, support is still needed 

Mowing the grass at cemeteries is hard enough these days with modern mowers and trimmers. Imagine what it was like in the 1800s and early 1900s before power mowers and weed whackers! At times during the cemetery’s long existence, the weeds and brambles took over – and snakes moved in. 

Things got so bad in the 1950s that a radical clean-off was done. Sue and Dora Jo say a bushhog or even a bulldozer was brought in. Dora Jo’s dad and another man “took the markers up and put them along the fenceline, and then they somehow – I don’t know how – put them back after they cleaned off the ground,” Dora Jo said last week. 

During her tenure as treasurer, she and her second husband, Roy Simmons, did the mowing. “It would take us half a day,” she said, and, answering the question, added that they weren’t paid for the work. 

She and Sue Robirds both remember a time when the cemetery was overgrown and seemed to be plagued by snakes. “I’d go with my parents to the cemetery,” Sue said, “and they would always warn me to watch for snakes.”

“There was a big, flat rock that they brought from somewhere,” Dora Jo said. “There might have been a grave. The snakes lived under that rock. When I started taking care of the cemetery, we got rid of that big rock – broke it all to pieces and sprayed under it for snakes and insects.”

That took care of the snake problem.

Now the cemetery is a quiet, pretty, well-maintained final resting place for dozens, maybe hundreds, of former Pond Fork-area residents. To keep it looking good, donations are needed to pay for mowing and other maintenance. To help, send or drop off checks for the Welch Cemetery Fund at any branch of Century Bank of the Ozarks, P.O. Box 68, Gainesville, MO 65655.