cline cemetery

I.C. Company Restores 19th Century Cemetery

RIVERSIDE -- A rural Johnson County cemetery that was widely forgotten and overrun by weeds for decades has been restored to a respectable final resting place for the more than 50 people buried there.Cline Cemetery , about three miles south of Hills, dates to the 1840s. But for several decades it was home to roaming pigs, wild vegetation and broken gravestones.

A few years ago, Iowa City-based River Products Company Inc. bought property, including the cemetery, for its new sand pit. Company workers have spent the past four years restoring the small graveyard. "In some areas ... when we picked up a rock we turned it over, 'Oops, this isn't a rock, it's a piece of a tombstone,'" said Deb Tisor, an executive assistant for River Products. Now, a white fence with a gate surrounds the 50-odd graves in the cemetery, a corner of the yard has been landscaped and many of the markers have been repaired.

River Products will hold a ribbon cutting at the cemetery at 10:30 a.m. today. Patrick and Betty Loan of Tiffin plan to be there. There are a few Loans buried in Cline Cemetery, including Pvt. William H. Loan, who fought in the Civil War and his 76-year-old Patrick's great-great grandfather. "It's important to remember our forbears - the lives they lived, the legacy they left for all of us," said Betty Loan. It was so important to them that they set out to find the cemetery, which is sometimes referred to as Strabala Cemetery, about 40 years ago. They knew it existed but didn't know where until finally finding it recorded in an old plat book.

When the Loans hiked out there, it was in a pig field with weeds over their heads and some of the headstones tipped over. A 1975 Iowa City Press-Citizen article tells of Patrick Loan's attempts to get the cemetery restored, but the Liberty Township trustees said they didn't have the money and the Johnson County Board of Supervisors said they lacked jurisdiction. Leigh Ann Randak, curator at the Johnson County Historical Society, said not much is known about the cemetery. The Cline family owned the land and established the cemetery and it appears other families were buried there. River Products' Tisor said many of the smaller markers were buried several inches deep in vines, grass and poison ivy. Workers, who made the repairs in their spare time, probed the grounds with metal rods to find the stones. They cleaned and repaired the stones they could. Eleven burial sites that they couldn't identify were replaced with limestone markers engraved with "Rest in Peace." Comments: (319) 339-3175; gregg.hennigan@gazcomm.com

Source: Courtesy of the Gazette Newspaper, Cedar Rapids, IA