Merriell Moyer

merriellmoyer@ldnews.com

A recently discovered historic graveyard is being restored thanks to efforts by local volunteers and members of the Berks County Association for Graveyard Preservation and the Lebanon County Genealogical Society.

The Light-Snavely Historic Burial Ground was discovered on land owned by the Lebanon Valley Economic Development Corporation buried under brush in a tree line near the railroad tracks off of Hanford Drive, North Lebanon, in the fall of 2015.

“When I got here in the fall, it wasn’t cleared like it is now – I literally carved a little hole in the brush with a chainsaw and crawled through,” Karla Hummel, secretary of the Berks County Association for Graveyard Preservation, said.

Hummel and her organization became involved when two relatives of the Lights contacted her.

“Larry Keller contacted my organization, and I honestly wouldn’t have come out, but he said Jack Warlow, a former mayor of Lebanon, is really hoping to see this graveyard restored,” Hummel explained.

Warlow, who is in his 90s and wheelchair-bound according to Hummel, was driven out to the site in a Jeep so he could see it after the brush was cleared in October by a group of Lebanon Valley College students who volunteered to do the job.

“Jack had been searching for this graveyard for quite a while, but no one in the area was doing anything about it,” Hummel said. “He spoke with a Light-family descendent, Keller, at the University of Illinois who went online and found our group.”

While the graveyard’s location proved elusive to those searching for it, Steve Dresch, owner of a nearby farm, has known of its existence for almost 20 years.

“I was out riding a horse through the area, and my horse slipped on Samuel Light’s gravestone,” Dresch said. “I wiped it down, and then I uncovered several others.”

Dresch made repeated attempts to get someone out to look at the graveyard, he said.

“I contacted so many people from the county and the township, but they all said I was crazy and that there was no graveyard there,” he said.

David Snavely, his wife Magdalena and his daughter Catherine are all buried in the graveyard, and all of them have gravestones with the top half written in English and the bottom half repeating the English, but translated into German.

“They are like my idea of the Rosetta Stone in a tombstone,” Hummel said. “They are fabulous.”

A lack of standardized spelling and names changing or becoming Americanized are a few of the things that can make interpreting the German on the stones a daunting task, according to Hummel, so having stones that translate the German into English are helpful.

There is still some confusion regarding the graveyard, however.

“They call it Snavely because it was on the Snavely farm, but it was the Light’s because they started it,” Hummel said. “It gets kind of confusing because Samuel Light married Maria Light – that was her married name and her maiden name – but when Maria died, he married her sister who was also a Light, but she went by Lichtin because Licht was German for Light, and if you were female a lot of times you added an ‘-in’ to show you were a female. And she’s in here too but Lichtin is what is on her stone.”

To figure out who is who and how they are related, Hummel said she and her organization had to do research on the names and dates provided on the gravestones.

While some historic graveyards are restored and cared for by churches and other organizations, this one will be taken care of by volunteers, at least for the time being, according to Hummel. Maintenance of the area, as well as restoring walls or fences and removing tree roots, can be very costly, but if it isn’t done it will just get grown over again, Hummel said.

Hummel and her volunteers will be using a chemical biocide that kills fungus and other organic growth on the stone down to its roots because the roots are what cause the gravestones to flake and the writing to fade, Hummel said.

“You just spray it on and you walk away,” she said. “You come back, and you have a white gravestone.”

People have used bleach and abrasive materials in the past to try to clean tombstones, but those harsh methods remove the stone’s protection and it will likely crumble within a decade or two, according to Hummel. Her organization doesn’t advise doing rubbings of the stones anymore either since that only aids in the erosion process, she said.

Hummel doesn’t think they’ll be able to get the graveyard’s broken stones upright again just using epoxy and mortar, the traditional methods for repair, she said.

“Sometimes they encase them in metal – it’s really ugly but it works,” Hummel said. “We should be able to reset some of these, but it’ll take a couple of loads of fine gravel and some strong volunteers.”

Members of the Lebanon Valley Genealogical Society have volunteered to help with the restoration project.

“A few of us came here when it was still very overgrown,” Denise Hoffman, president of the Lebanon Valley Genealogical Society, said. “We want to stay connected to this, and we want to try to support it as much as we can.”

While the restoration process has begun, there are still some big question marks in the graveyard’s future.

“We have to come up with the big plan, which is what do we do with it once we find it all and get it laid out in rows?” Hummel asked. “Do we stand all the stones up? Do we put cases on them? Right now, I don’t have a clue. I want our stonemason to come out and look, and I’ll send pictures to some of the national organizations and see if they have any ideas.”