City Cleanup at Downtown Charleston Cemetery Underway After Community Call to Action
Concerns from the community have sparked a much-needed cleanup operation at a late-1800s downtown Charleston cemetery. The graveyard, located on the city’s Oceanic Street, is a non-perpetual care cemetery. In other words, the maintenance of gravesite and related information updates are left to the families with loved ones laid to rest there.
The cemetery’s management ceased operations a few years prior due to the declining rate of burials, which subsequently led to a decrease in maintenance funds. As a result, families have had difficulty locating their relatives’ headstones as overgrown grass and debris have obscured paths and concealed gravesites.
The Call to Action
In response to this issue, a member of the community put out a call to action on social media, urging volunteers to help clean up the neglected cemetery. Thankfully, the appeal was answered with vigor, as community involvement has significantly increased since the call was made.
Keep Charleston Beautiful Programs Coordinator, Jamie Gillette, expressed appreciation for the passion that locals have shown towards the initiative. He described the current state of the cemetery, stating, “The grass has gotten really high out here. It was like waist-high. Family members were having problems even finding headstones for their family that was buried out here. It wasn’t very accessible or very safe for them to access the site.”
Community Effort
Plans by Keep Charleston Beautiful entail the cleanup of the overgrown grass, litter, and displaced tree limbs at Monrovia Cemetery. All these plans are in response to the feedback from the community. Community input has been crucial as it steers the direction of the cleanup initiative. Maurice Lee, a local resident, has dedicated his free time since 2022 to cleaning the area.
Maurice Lee’s task started with cutting down the grass that was obscuring gravesites. However, he realized that the scale of work required was too great for any one individual to handle. Consequently, he reached out to the community for additional support. His social media post about the cemetery conditions resonated with several community members who committed to join him. Nine others have since joined him, dedicating their evenings over the past week to this worthy cause.
The Road Ahead
Such extensive community involvement indicates the level of commitment that Charleston residents have for their city. To date, 90 local individuals have signed up for the upcoming cemetery cleanup. City leaders are still appealing for more help, with the event this Sunday set to run from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The community-led action in Charleston serves as a testament to the power of collective action towards fostering a clean and hospitable environment for all within the city limits. It shows that when the community comes together, even the task of cleaning up an abandoned 19th-century cemetery becomes an achievable goal.
