Tombstones toppled at Lorimier Cemetery

~ Sixty-nine were pushed over in latest of many incidents of vandalism at the city's oldest burial ground.

Ongoing vandalism at Cape Girardeau's oldest cemetery reached a new level over the weekend when 69 tombstones were toppled in the Old Lorimier Cemetery.

A line of broken headstones greets visitors entering through the cemetery's south gate. The damaged grave markers, some dating back to the early 1800s, include several that show the signs of past vandalism.

"This is one of five or six times a year this happens, but usually not this many," said Terrell Weaver, manager of the city's public cemeteries. "Usually once a year we get hit by a larger number of monuments knocked over."

The cemetery is the resting place for Cape Girardeau's founder, Louis Lorimier, and his wife, Charlotte, who was one of the first people buried there in 1808. Lorimier established the cemetery at 500 N. Fountain St. that year.

The cemetery was officially named to the National Register of Historic Places on Sept. 28, Weaver said.

Cape Girardeau police took a report on the vandalism and will seek felony charges if the perpetrators are discovered, patrolman Jason Selzer said.

Weaver discovered the damage Monday morning when he unlocked the cemetery gates.

The cemetery is surrounded on three sides by a 6-foot chain link fence with three strands of barbed wire at the top. Although there is a hole in the fence on the south side, Weaver said he believes the vandals scaled the fence at the northeast corner.

A small wooded area comes close to the cemetery at that location and the barbed wire over the gate there is pushed down as if someone stood on it.

Most of the toppled tombstones are in the eastern and southern sections of the cemetery. Some of those pushed over are just stumps of the original stones, the result of past forays by vandals.

The cemetery contains the graves of numerous pioneers. There are about 1,450 marked graves in the cemetery, but Weaver believes as many as 5,000 people may be buried there. No burials have taken place in the cemetery since 1982.

Notables buried in the cemetery include Alexander Buckner, a U.S. Senator at the time of his death in 1833, Revolutionary War soldier Uriah Brock and railroad builder Louis Houck.

Neighboring apartment owner James Harris said he has paid extra when removing trees near his building to avoid damaging the headstones. "I don't understand what kind of personal gratification anyone could get out of that," Harris said.

The cemetery has overhead lights, but none work, Weaver said. Calls to AmerenUE for maintenance haven't been answered, he said.

AmerenUE Southeast Missouri manager Jean Mason said she was unsure whether the lights were the city's responsibility or that of her company to maintain.

Signs of past damage are everywhere in the cemetery. Some headstones have been patched with concrete, some with glue. Weaver said both kinds of patches quickly fail.

A stack of pieces from various headstones sits behind a maintenance shed at the cemetery. Those pieces were recovered from a backyard on Spanish Street, where someone had used them to pave a backyard path.

The effort to put the cemetery back in order will begin today, Weaver said.

There is a procedure that can help some of the broken headstones look better, he said. "The process takes 10 hours to do one stone. They are breaking them faster than I can do them. And it is coming to the point where the markers are so old there is not a lot you can do."