Nature’s Cycle of
Death and Renewal [Reprint of my Apple Valley Cider Press Article, July 2015 Issue]
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| Lisa Schott (left) and Kris Kennard Caldwell at a 2015 Reunion tour of Kenyon College's new green cemetery. (Photo by Don Comis) |
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| First burial at Kenyon College's Kokosing Nature Preserve. Only shallow natural stone grave markers are allowed. The first marker can be seen in right foreground. (Photo by Don Comis) |
June 6 [2015] at Kenyon College was a day of joy amidst death. When I arrived at the Brown Family
Environmental Center that day, I was surprised to see two fire trucks, one with
a raised ladder.
As I escorted my friends and their children and
grandchildren, 18 of us by a quick count, to the Center’s ponds for Family
Adventure Day, I could see a memorial service close by. Then I saw a flag raised on the fire truck’s
raised ladder and I remembered reading in the Mount Vernon News that there
would be a memorial service at the Brown Center for a veteran born in Ohio, with
parents in Gambier.
I was very aware that June 6 would also be the day of the
first burial at Kenyon’s “green cemetery” on the grounds of the former Tomahawk
Golf Course, at 10620 Quarry Chapel Road, one and a half miles northeast of
Kenyon. I had learned that in late May
when I took a bus tour of sites Kenyon’s Philander Chase Corporation has preserved,
one of the events at my 45th class reunion. The Corporation is Kenyon’s nonprofit land
trust, created in 2000.
Development Eats up
7-9 Acres an Hour
The Chase land trust formation in 2000 was spurred partly by
plans for a recreational-vehicle park along the Kokosing River, right at the
base of Kenyon’s “Hill”. Worried about
inappropriate development near the college, amidst statewide development of 7
to 9 acres an hour, the college set up the trust to fund conservation and
agricultural easements as well as outright land purchases in the college’s vicinity,
if deemed essential. The Corporation matches state funding and provides
expertise to farmers considering granting easements.
Kenyon bought the site of the planned RV park. For several years after that, the College set
about buying land that was “strategically contiguous” to the first purchase,
including the 480 acres that became the Brown Family Environmental Center
preserve, which helps keep the Kokosing River pristine. To date the college owns 1,200 acres, while
helping fund easements on more than 3,800 additional acres. And the Owl Creek Conservancy, a sister trust
to the Chase trust, has preserved nearly 2,422 additional acres in the Knox
County area.
Kokosing Nature
Preserve Has First Burial
Lisa Schott, a 1980 Kenyon graduate who is managing director
of the Philander Chase Corporation, explained that they bought the 51-acre golf
course when it closed and no buyers were forthcoming. They reduced the golf course to 9 holes on 27
acres and leased out that business and created a nature preserve and green cemetery
on the rest of the land, called the “Kokosing Nature Preserve.”
Schott explained that a green cemetery requires burials to
use only biodegradable materials, with no concrete vaults or embalming of
bodies. This allows people to be buried
in just a shroud if they wish or in a coffin made of wood, wicker, bamboo,
cardboard, or any material that will degrade in the soil. Wood used for the coffin can’t be treated
wood. Ashes can be buried as well.
In a fact sheet handed out on the tour I read that, “Natural
burial is the way most people have been buried throughout the ages. The use of concrete vaults and embalming are
relatively new concepts, becoming popular in the United States during the Civil
War. Natural burial is a re-emerging
movement nationally and worldwide. The
nation’s first conservation burial ground, Ramsey Creek Preserve in South
Carolina, opened in 1998. Forty-two [now
47] cemeteries are approved by the Green Burial Council across the United
States. The national burial movement…offers
a traditional, environmentally sound alternative [to conventional burials]…the Green
Burial Council [is] an independent not-for-profit organization that has
established eco-certification standards for natural burial grounds.”
The cemetery is on 24 acres of restored prairies and
woodlands, with the first burial being in a newly planted dogwood grove on a
hill between ponds and woods, east of the cemetery’s entrance. Each plot can accommodate one body and two
people’s ashes or just the ashes of four people. The June 6 burial was of ashes of one
person. There is room for about 2,300
plots, each measuring 10- by 15-feet.
The plots cost $5,000 each--$2,500 as a gift to the
Philander Chase Corporation and $2,500 for the actual plot. The money helps the Chase trust fund the
purchase of easements on —or to buy—land to protect the area surrounding Kenyon
and retain the pastoral beauty that gives Gambier and Knox County its character
and environmental soundness. As Schott
said, “it’s good for everyone’s health and well-being.”
Kenyon is the first college or university to combine a green
cemetery with land conservation. Until
the purchase of the Tomahawk Golf Course, the trust was funded only by
donations from alumni and others. Schott noted the irony of one alumni donor
who added as a restriction on how the donation could be used that it not be
used by the college itself for development!
Ashes can also be scattered in designated areas throughout
the nature preserve—wooded areas, prairie, ponds or wet meadows. The price will be “significantly less than
purchasing interment rights for a burial plot,” according to Amy Henricksen,
project coordinator for the Philander Chase Corporation and steward of the
Kokosing Nature Preserve. The price will
cover the cost of GPS locating and maintaining a permanent record of the
scattering.
This is the first green cemetery in central Ohio. When approved by the Green Burial Council, it
will be the fifth such approved cemetery statewide. Plus, since the creation of the Kokosing
cemetery, Knox County’s first Jewish green cemetery opened as an expansion of
the College Township Cemetery near Quarry Chapel, Schott said. Jewish cemeteries have always been green
cemeteries.
There are 50 Green Burial Council-approved
cemeteries in North America to date, plus 206 approved funeral homes. This includes the Flowers-Snyder Funeral Home
in Mt. Vernon. Henricksen said that the
Schoedinger Funeral Homes in Columbus are also an approved provider “and they
have expressed interest in having us meet with their directors/staff when we
are operational as well.”
Henricksen added that both the Dowd-Snyder and Lasater
Funeral Homes in Mt. Vernon “have agreed to share information about [the]
Kokosing Nature Preserve with families who are interested in green burial.”
The Kokosing Nature Preserve is open to everyone as a park
and cemetery, although it is not fully operational yet, with no signage and final
landscaping, pillar stonework, and other work underway. Henricksen said, “our plan is to be fully
marketing/selling plots by the end of the summer.”
Schott said that participants in the first burial had a
picnic in the park after the burial, complete with a bluegrass band, to
celebrate the life of their loved one.
She said many people are signing up for plots from all over
the country, not just people related to Kenyon.
Stephen Christie, a 1971 Kenyon graduate, is the landscape
architect for the preserve. He supervised
the planting of the oak and maple trees that line the cemetery’s entrance and
the dogwood grove. David Kridler, a 1975 Kenyon graduate, is the master stone
mason doing the stonework for the pillars at the cemetery’s entrance and the
cemetery sign.
The pillars are a nod to the old stone center pole at the
gateway of the “Middle Path” that goes straight through the historic part of
Kenyon, a pole I’ve remembered fondly ever since the ‘60s, when I passed it
daily on the way to classes.
As I walked around the Kokosing Nature Preserve ponds during
the reunion tour, I heard more green frogs give their human-like scream and
plop into the water than ever before. I
was also thrilled to watch a large snapping turtle amble from one pond to
another while a great blue heron stood nearby.
Hendricksen said, “There are about 70 burial plots in the
newly planted dogwood grove.” About another 150 plots will be in the existing
woods. “The majority of the plots will
be in the open spaces that have been planted to prairie grasses and
wildflowers,” she said.
Kenyon Farm Safe for
Posterity
Besides the green cemetery, Schott showed us many other
acres protected by the Corporation, including the 11-acre Kenyon Farm on Route
308, on the way to Kenyon from Route 36.
Kenyon bought that farm in 2012.
An article in the Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin in 2012
said that while the trust normally limits itself to a radius of about five
miles around Kenyon, it made an exception when it helped the County create Wolf
Run Regional Park. The pace of
purchasing easements has quickened since 2010, from 15 to more than 30,
according to the article.
The article quoted Schott as saying, “I think the College is
wise…You want to protect your view corridors, and you want to protect your
water. The Kokosing River is dear, and not only for the beauty's sake. We want
this buffer.”
On our recent alumni tour, Schott said that Kenyon wants to
be sure that students see farmland when they look out the windows of their
dining hall—and that people driving in the area see Kenyon’s historic buildings
as a backdrop to a bucolic landscape.
On our bus ride, she pointed out the sight of the stone tower
rising from historic Peirce Hall, which houses the student dining area,
overlooking farmland and farmhouses and barns.
Schott said neither she nor the Chase trust is anti-development,
but support only careful development that is right for an area.
The Next Generation
of Wildlife
At the Brown Center on June 6, the children caught tadpoles
in several stages of development as well as one small frog and a baby painted
turtle. So we know the amphibians have
mated. On an earlier walk at the Center,
during another reunion activity, we heard baby pileated woodpeckers crying for
food and watched one of the parents conduct a frantic search for food before
nightfall, while talking to itself!
Later, while driving on AV Drive on June 8 to check out AV
resident Debbie Minard’s hostas, we stopped as a doe crossed the road and then
saw her tiny fawn with enough sense to delay crossing until assured we were
stopped and then joined her watchful mother.
That was the youngest fawn I’ve seen.
Minard told me she had seen a red-bellied woodpecker couple
taking food from her feeder to three youngsters perched on a branch above the
feeder. This proved to me that Minard is
right about the importance of feeding birds in summer—this is when they teach
youngsters how to recognize bird feeders.
I also learned recently that the purple, white and pink
flowers that brightened roadsides and woods for several weeks this spring were
Dame’s rocket, not the phlox I thought they were. Dame’s rocket was an old
garden favorite in England years ago. People
planted it in American gardens and it escaped.
Since it’s so plentiful around Memorial Day, this is the flower I think
should be planted on veterans’ graves, replacing the daffodils my 95-year-old
mother-in-law recalls placing on Civil War graves on what used to be called
Decoration Day.
Nature’s cycle of life and death continues.
Note: Check out my
website (www.doncomis.simplesite.com) and blog (www.donaldcomis.blogspot.com)
for more photos and stories. For
example, by searching for my “Visiting Guy Denny's Ohio Prairie” blog of July
27, 2014, you can read about my experience last year at an event that will be
repeated this July 26, with a link to the Owl Creek Conservancy’s website list
of this and other upcoming events in the 14th annual “Explore the Nature of
Knox County” 2015 series.
Anyone with comments or suggestions is welcome to send me an
e-mail at doncomis@centurylink.net or post comments on my website or blog.
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