Historical Cemetery Maintenance at Riverside

Observing the more sophisticated and sizeable digging, mowing, and trimming equipment used to maintain our cemetery today might lead one to think such tasks were always accomplished with comparable convenience. This is definitely not the case.

During most of our first half-century, we used three horses to provide our power. Our early garage was a barn with several stalls. Horses were used to pull the various machines that cut the grass as well as pull the carriages that carried the caskets and led the funeral processions to the various gravesites as appropriate. When engines on lawnmowers came about, we experimented with different types. Workers trimmed around monuments, headstones, and landscape growth with hand sickles.

In the 1950s, Bill Halley, former General Manager of Riverside, hand-hauled water as a member of the cemetery's grounds staff.

Until 1974 all graves were dug by men and shovels. Generally, this involved three individuals. Two would do the actual digging of the grave while the third handled the disposal of the displacement soil. This soil would be shoveled into a wheelbarrow and generally pushed up a wooden ramp into a truck where it was dumped and later unloaded. It took about 3-1/2-4 hours to open a grave by hand.