The oldest person buried in the Blackberry Township Cemetery was born in 1772, four years before the birth of the United States of America. His name was Ebenezer Kendall, and he was said to have known George Washington.
Blackberry Township Supervisor Fred Dornback was the guest speaker at the Elburn Chamber of Commerce meeting on April 7. He served as Blackberry Township cemetery's superintendent before he became supervisor, and he recounted some of the cemetery's history, as well as some other stories, during the meeting.
The cemetery, located on the northeast corner of Route 47 and Keslinger Road, was established in 1860 when the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Lodge No. 222 approached the local Blackberry Lodge Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons, requesting their support to create a common burial ground in Blackberry.
Together, they formed the Blackberry Cemetery Association and purchased the land from Jacob Johnson for $50 per acre. The price of a lot was a minimum of $5, but people could bid on them, in some cases increasing the cost to $5.50. Each lot, which was to be 36 inches wide, could have a number of graves on it. However, they were of various lengths.
During hard times, people would borrow money from the cemetery, and they paid it back at an interest rate of 10 percent.
The most elaborate memorial was built for a man named Don Iverson at a cost of half a million dollars. Iverson was a graduate of Elburn High School who went on to become a successful businessman and often went to great lengths to impress his former classmates, once hosting an entire class reunion on his yacht.
There is another large structure within the cemetery, but it does not mark a specific grave. Because the graves were dug by hand, when people died during the winter, the ground was too frozen to dig a proper grave. Dornback said the bodies were kept in this structure until the ground was thawed out enough to bury them.
Record-keeping was meticulous, but each person did it in their own way, making for some confusing data. When lots were sold, maps were drawn of their location, but the maps overlapped and were not always clear on where the boundaries of lots began and ended. And, as attorney Bob Britz explained, when people bought a lot, they were not buying real estate – they were buying the “right to internment.”
When Dornback took on the responsibility of the cemetery, he received bags and suitcases full of documents. He began by sorting them by decades. At the start, there were more than 60 unknown people buried in the cemetery. He enlisted the help of longtime Elburn native Helen (Gould) Johnson, and together they sorted through the available identifying documents and searched newspapers for obituaries for matches.
Johnson passed away this year, but – before she did – she and Dornback whittled the list down to 30 unknowns.
The village of Elburn each year holds its Memorial Day service on the grounds of Blackberry Township Cemetery. In the week before the ceremony, flags are placed at the grave sites of all of the soldiers buried there.
Dornback said he found a military map from 1939 that identified three soldiers from the War of 1812, 39 from the Civil War and four from World War I. Back then, they didn’t think to number the bodies.
More recent data identified 26 soldiers from World War I, 92 from World War II, 28 from the Korean War and seven from the Vietnam War.
One death record Dornback found identified a “male with a .35 caliber bullet in his chest; cause of death unknown,” and another that identified the body as either male or female, found somewhere between Elburn and Geneva, where he or she “either fell or was pushed from the train.”
Dornback said a more recent development is the growing popularity of the cremation garden.
“Now, about half of the burials are cremations,” Dornback said.
One reason cremation is a popular avenue is because it is less expensive. Internment in the cremation garden costs $450 for township residents, which includes the opening and closing of the site, as well as an engraved brick, compared to a cost of $800 for a standard grave site, as well as an additional $850 for the grave opening and closing.
Dornback encourages area residents to visit the cemetery to find the many historical bits of information and to view some of the unique family monuments.