By AMY R. SISK, The Bismarck Tribune

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Veterans and their families will soon have a new option for a final resting place at the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery.

Cremated remains handled by the cemetery south of Mandan are currently buried, but construction is expected to begin next summer on a columbarium, which is a structure designed to hold urns above ground. The cemetery secured federal funding earlier this month for the project.

The columbarium will be northeast of the existing burial area at the cemetery on land purchased in 2015. The first phase, with space to inter 1,800 remains, could be finished as soon as the summer of 2021.

Col. Clark Johnson, director of facilities for the North Dakota Army National Guard, said cremation burials have increased over the past decade and now make up more than half of the 9,010 remains interred at the cemetery. As many as 300 cremated remains are buried there annually.

"That became a little bit of a concern from a cemetery management outlook, that we're utilizing full body burial spaces," Johnson told The Bismarck Tribune.

Not wanting to run out of room for burials, cemetery officials decided to pursue a columbarium and give families the option of using it to store their loved ones' remains.

The columbarium will be located outside, focused around a circular structure where families can visit their loved ones whose remains are held in spaces known as "niches" that make up the round wall.

"It would be a nice, quiet, contemplative area, but yet they step outside the wall and feel like they're in the rest of the cemetery as well," Johnson said.

Future phases of the columbarium will add additional niches in rows around the circular wall. Veterans, guardsmen, reservists, spouses and dependents could be buried at the facility.

The cemetery worked with landscape architecture students from North Dakota State University on the design. The partnership came about when Professor Dominic Fischer received a phone call from Brig. Gen. Robert Becklund, as the two knew each other through Becklund's wife, who also is a landscape architect.

The eight graduate students in Fischer's cultural landscapes seminar last fall got to work developing 20 drawings of potential designs. They narrowed and refined the ideas, presenting several to the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery Foundation for feedback.

Fischer and his graduate research assistant, Morgan Davis-Kollman, put together the final renderings for the design that's moving forward. Now, it's in the hands of the Fargo-based firm Shultz + Associates Architects, which is further refining the design to ready it for construction.

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Information from: Bismarck Tribune, http://www.bismarcktribune.com

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