News from the Silent City on the Hill – March 2025

IT’S BEEN A CHILLY and wet winter so far, but spring is on the way and will be here before we know it!

Meanwhile, the first scheduled event of the Friends of Jacksonville’s Historic Cemetery’s 2025 season, our customary Spring Community Cemetery Clean-Up Day, March 22nd, will help get the cemetery ready for the warmer and brighter days ahead that make living in Southern Oregon so enjoyable. Those days offer the perfect backdrop to be out and about enjoying Friends’ summer programs in our beautiful historic cemetery. Please see event details below.

We’ve recently posted our Report Card for 2024 on the FOJHC website (friendsjvillecemetery.org) highlighting the nearly 1,000 hours logged by our volunteers both in maintaining the grounds and monuments of our historic cemetery and in recounting the stories of Jacksonville’s past through presentations and tours. Keep in mind that the Report Card tallies do not include the hundreds of un-logged hours contributed by Adopt-A-Block program participants maintaining their adopted blocks. Taken together, these combined efforts represent volunteerism at its finest, and our community enjoys a beautiful historic cemetery because of them!

In addition, the Friends website is now updated with event dates for 2025 and includes a new Pioneer Stories section offering online access to the text of the thirteen individual and family storyboards that can be found in the cemetery today. Together with an additional four storyboards to be installed at their respective gravesites this spring, these stanchion-mounted plaques provide cemetery visitors with insights into the lives of some of Jacksonville’s pioneering families and individuals. The Pioneer Stories website tabs make this information available to a wider audience, including those unable to visit the cemetery or participate in walking tours.

Finally, the City of Jacksonville and the Cemetery Committee have begun planning for eventual development of the 11-acres on the north side of the cemetery. This is a long-term effort with the focus at this point being infrastructure design (roads and pathways, water, block layout, etc.). Planning is also under way for near-term replacement of two flagpoles in the cemetery, including their respective surrounds and landscaping.

Spring Community Cemetery Clean-Up Day, Saturday, March 22, 9am-noon—Please join us for our first cemetery clean-up day of 2025. As usual, please meet at the Sexton’s Tool House at the top of Cemetery Road for directions to the focus clean-up areas and bring gloves to wear, eye and ear protection, leaf rakes, pruners, and/or electric/gas-operated blowers as we will be raking and bagging leaves, picking up branches and limbs and doing a general clean-up of winter debris.

Please check our website at friendsjvillecemetery.org for future events and programs.

Featured image: Late Afternoon in the Jacksonville Historic Cemetery, January 2025. Photo by: Dick Meyers