MYRTLE CREEK, Ore. — On job sites, people often ask Reid Davis if he’s looking for gold or Jimmy Hoffa as he operates a radar machine that sounds out objects buried underground.
On a recent Friday, the GPR Data employee slowly walked a red antennae cart resembling a lightweight lawn mower back and forth on top of an oak knoll in Myrtle Creek.
Although he wasn’t searching for missing Teamsters, he was looking for graves.
The Myrtle Creek Pioneer Cemetery Committee brought in GPR Data, a family-owned company out of Eugene, to locate unmarked gravesites.
Over the last four years the Pioneer Cemetery received some much-needed care after vandals toppled and broke more than 70 headstones on July 24, 2006.
“I can’t tell you how awful it was to see all the stones lying on the ground,” said Norma Davidson, who has ancestors buried there. “I just sat down and started to cry.”
Davidson joined the volunteer restoration effort.
It’s estimated that 500 hours have been logged over the last four years to fix and reset the stones and care for the grounds.
After using grants to invest in a new fence, an ornate locking gate and an information board, the committee rededicated the repaired cemetery in May 2008.
But there were memorials the group couldn’t replace.
A well-meaning boys group had accidentally piled up rotted and fallen wooden crosses along with brush during a clean-up day.
That was in the ‘70s, and volunteers say there’s no record of where those gravesites are, although clues turn up now and then.
“In pioneer times they didn’t bury people 6 feet under, they’re buried just below the surface,” Davidson said. “We actually hit a grave with a shovel.”
In April 2008, Davidson’s daughter, group secretary Elizabeth Banducci, started researching ground- penetrating radar as a way to locate the pine boxes so the committee could place markers over each one.
Banducci said the group’s amateur historian Blanche Newton spoke of a picture in which it appeared hundreds of crosses filled the now bare spots in the graveyard.
The conservative guess is that between 50 and 75 unmarked graves are among the 100 headstones and footstones.
Banducci said the group is designing a marker that will be used to mark the sites once GPR Data’s report arrives.
“What’s so interesting to me is how connected we really are,” said Trudy Thompson as she watched the activity. “You feel like you really get to know each and every one of them. Once you read the history of them, they become even closer.”
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