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Every Day Is Memorial Day At Mount Zion Cemetery in Wheeling

Photo by Heather Ziegler Paul Stein and Stephen Davis show a plaque they are installing at Mount Zion Cemetery to indicate the many graves of children buried there.

At Mount Zion Cemetery, every day is Memorial Day for a handful of dedicated volunteers.

Before Paula Stein and Stephen Davis took up the cause to maintain the more than 150-year-old graveyard along Fairmont Pike in Ohio County where the known and unknown are buried, the site had been nearly abandoned. Weeds and grass choked the property to the point grave markers were lost in the six acres of land that borders Caldwell Run.

Davis’ dedication to the cemetery is matched by his belief in honoring those who no longer have anyone to look after their final resting places. In particular, he and Stein took extra steps and plenty of hours to rid the grounds of the overgrowth.

“We started finding these graves of children. There is a whole section just where kids are buried,” Davis said. “You can see the angels and things on the graves now.”

Many of those graves are from early times of the 19th century when illness took young lives now protected by modern medicine.

Stein and Davis, who are founding members of the Mount Zion Cemetery Association, also take pride in having uncovered a steep hillside section of the cemetery where 128 graves are located. These remains were originally buried in the Peninsula Cemetery in Wheeling and removed to make room for the construction of Interstate 70 in the early 1960s. The graves then were moved to Mount Zion Cemetery.

Some of the headstones are so worn that the names cannot be seen anymore. The cemetery group had a sign erected that indicates that information.

Davis said it is not known who is buried in 94 of those plots, as records for those graves cannot be found.

While the cemetery was operated under the auspices of the local Zion Lutheran congregation, the city of Wheeling and the Ohio County Commission also contributed to its upkeep over the years. However a lack of funding left the cemetery without proper care.

Today, it’s in the hands of the cemetery association.

Stein said it’s hard work to maintain the hillside cemetery, but the volunteers take pride in knowing they are preserving a piece of the local history. Now she is asking the public to help them observe Memorial Day every day by honoring all the people, especially the veterans dating back to the Civil War, who are buried there.

The association members will host a volunteer day on June 2 and the first Saturday of each month moving forward. By 10 a.m., workers will be in full swing, weather permitting, but volunteers can arrive any time during the morning to get started. They will supply the equipment for cutting and trimming and water and snacks to keep volunteers fueled for the day.

For more information, visit the cemetery’s Facebook page.

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