DE PERE, WI (WTAQ) – It may be the midst of the season for ghosts and ghouls, but something much more ominous is haunting the Greenwood Cemetery in De Pere. The Fox River.
The river has been eating away at the edge of the cemetery property for decades.
“Back in the 1900’s, a lot of graves floated away…In the sixties, I have newspaper pictures that show where actually it dropped like four feet because of the erosion of the shoreline…I grew up on that river, and I remember in the seventies when caskets were hanging out and they had to move people,” said De Pere Greenwood Cemetery Association President Jewels Sowers. “It’s been an ongoing thing. In the seventies, they moved graves. In the nineties, they had to move graves. We’ve found down on the shoreline, headstones from the 1900’s that fell in. We assume there are some more headstones laying in that hillside somewhere.”
Newspaper clipping from May 11, 1960 showing erosion issues at Greenwood Cemetery in De Pere. (IMAGE: Courtesy of De Pere Greenwood Cemetery)
Sowers says they have names of at least twelve families who had to pay to disinter ancestors and were given new plots to move them into. And that’s just from the 1970’s.
They’re facing even worse issues now than before. That’s why State Representative John Macco is stepping in to help out.
“Water levels are almost at an unprecedented 100-year high,” Macco told WTAQ News. “Residents, including my brother, who live along the river have had to do substantial reparations to their shoreline to keep it from eroding. I think in my brother’s case, they lost 20-30 feet.”
Macco says that anecdote has been shared by residents, as well as commercial properties located along the river.
“We have people who bought their lot 25-30 years ago, and their lots were 16×16. Now, they’re probably, if they’re lucky, seven feet deep. They cannot bury their full families there anymore because the hillside has eroded,” Sowers said. “They wanted to have their family buried and we don’t have room for them because their property has eroded away.”
Trees along the shoreline have fallen into the water as well.
“I have walked that shoreline and taken yardstick, it’s like 3 feet underneath is totally washed out,” Sowers said.
“It is still a place of sanctuary that people want to be able to visit, and to have to have orange fencing cordoning parts of it off because of the danger of erosion is not acceptable,” Macco added.
Macco, Sowers, and other supporters of the cemetery have been working to come up with a reasonable reparation program that could be utilized immediately to prevent the erosion and restore the shoreline – protecting grave sites in that area. But they’re running into issues with red tape.
“The DNR has been typically bureaucratic. I’m profoundly frustrated with the performance of the DNR on this project,” Macco said. “The solution that the DNR is proposing is profoundly expensive and was not implemented in any of the other sites up and down that area on either side, so we’re at a bit of a loss.”
Sowers says DNR officials told her that they even came to check out the area.
A tree uprooted by the Fox River at De Pere Greenwood Cemetery. (IMAGE: Courtesy of Jewels Sowers)
“She said she went out and walked in areas she could get down to. And I said ‘why didn’t you walk the whole thing?’ – You can’t get down because it’s eroded so badly,” Sowers said. “We had this feasibility study – everything that needs to be done to shore up that hillside for probably 100 year. The DNR, the biggest thing that we need is that rip-rap put in, and they won’t do it…The DNR gave permits to Wrightstown to do almost identical to what we want to do here. Wrightstown got to do it, but we’re not allowed to.”
Sowers says the DNR suggested installing rip logs to keep the waves at bay, but she argues that they’d have to replace them in fifteen years – and a long-term solution is necessary.
“A major Green Bay area engineering firms who does this as a routine basis put together a quality engineering program that would retain the integrity of the quality of the water in the shoreline and the natural habitat and yet that doesn’t seem to be satisfactory,” Macco said. “It has to be fixed. They’re more than willing to get it fixed. They’re more than willing to spend the money that it takes to put in whatever rip-rap, support systems, or anything that needs to be done. But there needs to be some common sense and a meeting of the minds. At this point, all I get is weird emails from the DNR.”
WTAQ News reached out to DNR officials regarding this topic, but we have not yet received a response.
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