Search is on to identify owner of Glen Arbor Township Cemetery
From staff reports
A volunteer group of citizens are working to identify who owns the Glen Arbor Township Cemetery in the woods behind Forest Haven Road and M-22, on land that borders the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. They include Linda Alice Dewey (an artist and author, and frequent contributor to the Glen Arbor Sun), Barbara Siepker, John and Mary Tris, and local historian Andrew White.
A title search is underway to determine whether the cemetery is owned by The Township or by the National Lakeshore. The title search is expected to be complete within the next week. The assumption had previously been that the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore owned the property.
The site served as the Glen Arbor Township Cemetery from 1879 to 1927, Dewey reported in a December 3, 2019, story. Aside from a few family plots within the township, if your obituary noted that you died in Glen Arbor, you would probably have been buried there.
The cemetery had been virtually abandoned and penned-in by the August 2015 storm until volunteers took up the revival effort this past fall. In November 2019, Parshall Tree Care Experts cleared 13 gravestones, three of which belonged to Civil War veterans.
According to minutes from the February 18 Glen Arbor Township Board Meeting, supervisor Peter Van Nort indicated that he and the aforementioned volunteer group had met with National Lakeshore staff in order to “figure out how the Park can grant permission to the citizens group to clean-up, maintain, and present activities at the cemetery.”
Van Nort said, according to minutes from the January 21 Township Board meeting, that “if the Township has ownership, we will proceed with the citizen group to upgrade and maintain the cemetery.”
Other groups are chipping in, too. Eighth graders from Glen Lake School will engage in a cemetery cleanup worker bee each fall or spring together with the nonprofit Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear. the fiduciary for the volunteer group.
An inaugural memorial ceremony for the cemetery, planned for sometime near Memorial Day, will include the Glen Lake students and will honor veterans and everyone buried there.
