Vandals work to fix damage at historic St. Joseph cemetery

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) -- The six teenagers who did thousands of dollars of damage to a historic cemetery have helped repair most of the destruction and perhaps learned some lessons at the same time.

The six vandals, ranging in age from 13 to 17, did more than $70,000 damage at Mount Mora Cemetery last Sept. 28 after tipping over headstones, crosses and obelisks, and scattering funerary materials from tombs.

Prosecutors said they damaged more than 300 graves at the 150-year-old cemetery, including that of Silas Woodson, governor of Missouri from 1873-1875.

Most of teenagers' sentences consisted of hundreds of hours of community service at the cemetery.

Suzanne Lehr, who serves on the Mount Mora Preservation and Restoration Association and recently contributed to the book, "Mount Mora 1851," met with four of the juveniles at the cemetery individually and taught them the history of the people buried there.

"After the opportunity to work with the young men ... it reinforced my understanding that sometimes bad choices are made because they have bad information," Lehr said. "Once they understood what was there, I believe each young man was impacted."

Huston Wyeth, chairman of the Mount Mora Cemetery board, said that an insurance policy covered the costs of restoring the toppled tombstones. The work was done by a local monument company and completed earlier this year.

While the vandalism has been erased, Mount Mora Cemetery is still struggling with a dwindling endowment fund, causing even regular maintenance to stagnate. It is one of the only cemeteries in Missouri on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Information from: St. Joseph News-Press, http://www.stjoenews-press.com