Woodlawn Cemetery tours kick off

LIMA —A cemetery is like a never-ending book, according to Woodlawn Cemetery tour guide George MacDonell.

Around a dozen people came out Saturday to ride the Downtown Lima Trolley through the cemetery and hear stories about the deceased who reside there, including historic residents of Lima.

“We come out here and ride around a lot, but I’d never seen the inside of any mausoleums,” Lima resident Peggy Stawarski said.

The tour took the tour through the cemetery, to sites including the graves of one of Lima’s biggest supporters of orphans, a retired colonel from the Civil War, the city’s second mayor and its first black police chief, as well as a man who performed aerial stunts with a hot air balloon and two brothers put to death for murder.

“You’ll hear stories about success and failure, happiness and sadness and a few murders, too,” MacDonell, whose own family is well-represented on the grounds, said. “In the cemetery business, we like to say if you say their names they’ll never be forgotten.”

MacDonell said he changes the tour every year depending on the new things he finds and likes to visit cemeteries in every new city he visits.

“Whether I’m in Buenos Aires or Edinburgh, I like to go there because it gives me a sense of place and history,” he said. “I get a clue what the architecture was like for the time when people were buried and gives you a good idea what was going on when you begin to study the dates on the monuments of headstones and mausoleums.”

Stawarski and Pam Horner joined the tour together as friends who both graduated from Lima Senior High School and enjoy history.

“It’s amazing how much history is in Lima,” Stawarski said.

“They give a lot of information,” Horner added.

“The more you look, the more you find,” MacDonell said. “I’ve had people come back two or three times.”

For tickets to next week’s tour at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 12, visit bit.ly/4ejBK5L.

 

Reach Jacob Espinosa at 567-242-0399.