By David Fleet
Editor
Atlas Twp. — On Monday night the township board of trustees voted 4-0 to approve a contract with Marquette-based Trimedia Environmental & Engineering to provide Geographic Information Systems and Ground Penetrating Radar based mapping services for the Atlas and Horton cemeteries.
The cost of the project is about $21,000. Both cemeteries are the responsibility and care of the township.
Ken Kaiser, Trimedia manager attended the meeting via Zoom to discuss the project which should begin this fall and be completed by next spring.
“A lot of the cemeteries are very old,” said Kaiser. “They don’t have maps or records or documents things were never marked.”
The process to mark the graves, many that are unknown, in both township cemeteries will include a drone flyover to report existing headstone data. Trimedia will then create a web-based interactive map of known grave sites.
“We will then use ground penetrating radar to confirm burials that are marked, then unmarked burials or anything that we find that’s an abnormality we’ll mark the depth and where’s it located.”
Once the data is collected, determination of where the graves are located can be recorded.
Dawn Bastin and Carol Powers from the Goodrich/Atlas Historical Society attended the meeting.
“The historical Atlas Cemetery is an important cultural, genealogy and architectural resource to our community’s history,” said Bastin. “The graves of our founding pioneers are worthy of our care and the cemetery can be established on the National Register of Historic Places.”
The historical Atlas Cemetery dating back more than 250 years, is located on a .69 acre tract of land just behind the Atlas Baptist Church, 6396 S. Gale Road, near the intersection of Gale and Perry roads in Atlas. Many of the stones are missing or dilapidated due to age. The fence is needed to help preserve the area. A survey of the cemetery was recently completed and the fence will secure the area.
Unique to the cemetery are the graves of Mary Hebbard, a direct descendant of William Bradford, Plymouth Colony and Oliver Palmer, son of Colonel John Palmer of the Continental Army are just two historical interments at the Atlas Cemetery.
The Horton Cemetery, was established as a burial ground about 180 years ago, with about 160 known graves, including Revolutionary War soldiers John and William Britton.
“Many of these soldiers lay beneath their original headstones but some of them passed over 184 years ago and their original graves have been lost to time,” said Bastian. “They are still honored by the DAR and SAR (Sons of the Revolution) with new headstones and brass markers.”
These new headstones and markers are placed next to family members, she said.
“These men fought to make a group of colonies into one nation.”