Military gravestones found in Burlington garden
Federal authorities are trying to solve an unlikely mystery:How did hundreds of gravestones that once marked the final resting places of military veterans come to form a garden wall in a 90-year-old man's Burlington Township yard?
Earlier this week, investigators went to the man's Columbus Road home, served a search warrant, removed the stones with a backhoe, and hauled them off to be crushed at a recycling plant.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, which the Department of Veterans Affairs said is handling the investigation, declined to identify the name or address of the man.
No charges have been filed.
"It's hard to characterize, but I think it's fairly uncommon," said Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the Veterans Affairs Department.
The stones, some dating to the Spanish-American War, came from the nearby Beverly National Cemetery, where 48,000 veterans are buried.
While some panicked visitors have been streaming the grounds after hearing about the garden wall made of tombstones, cemetery director Mary Hendley said all of the graves there are properly marked.
Headstones in national cemeteries are routinely replaced when they become damaged or illegible. Because most national cemeteries do double burials of a veteran and spouse, headstones are also replaced for the veteran when the spouse dies to include both names, according to Mike Nacincik, spokesman for the National Cemetery Administration at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"The odds are that these are replacement headstones that weren't properly disposed of," Nacincik said.
The department's policy is to shatter the old headstones so they are no longer readable, he said.
Yesterday, an 88-year-old Tabernacle woman turned in a fresh lead to cemetery officials.
Doris Nixon, who identified herself as a lifelong Burlington County resident, said in an interview that her first husband was one of a legion of men who replaced cemetery headstones in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration. The Great Depression-era program offered public jobs for unemployed people.
When the men finished the work, officials gave them the option of taking the old headstones, Nixon said; her husband declined.
"I used to walk over and watch them do all this," said Nixon.
Hendley said she has asked federal officials to check historical records that would corroborate Nixon's story. The records would be held by the U.S. Army, which oversaw the national cemetery system until it was transferred to the Veterans Administration in the 1970s.
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