MOKANE, Mo. - Keeping the Middle River Cemetery neat and tidy takes a fair bit of money.
"It costs $140 every time we mow, and most years, that's 13 times," Faye Zumwalt, president of the Middle River Cemetery Association, said. "And last year, we had some trees come down in a little twister."
Volunteers helped clean up, but in the end, professional help was necessary - costing more money.
On Saturday, members of the association are having a chili cook-off with two categories: sweet and spicy.
"There are seven enrolled," she said of the competition.
Judges will decide first- and second-place finishers in each contest. Time is running out to preregister a chili entry, but cooks can email their intent to Zumwalt at [email protected] or Lola Wekenborg (secretary/treasurer of the association) at [email protected]. There is no entry fee for contestants.
The event will be 4-7 p.m. Saturday at Tebbetts Community Hall. The public can sample chili, plus there will be hot dogs, potato soup and dessert. Adult tickets are $6 and children are $2.50.,
Middle River Cemetery has hired Michael Banak, owner of Adventures with Professional Technologies in Fulton, to conduct a survey. He is using modern technology - ground penetrating radar (GPR) - and other archeological methods to find forgotten graves, Zumwalt said.
"We found 157 graves so far that are not marked in any way," she added.
Zumwalt said the oldest marked grave dates back to the 1840s, but the newly found graves are older than that.
"The 1820s is my guess," she said.
The graveyard is near State Road PP and County Road 480, about 3 miles west of Mokane. Findagrave.com, a website that collects information on graveyards across America and the people buried in them, has a list of marked graves that include names such as Bagby, Dolman, Hornbuckle and Reynolds. About 330 graves are listed on that website by names, some with pictures. Many of them are early pioneers of Callaway County, Zumwalt said.
"It was genealogy that got me going to these meetings," she said of the association. "I have an IT background, and it was IT that got me involved and the part of my genealogy that's involved in Callaway."
She added she's working the DNA side of things, too, with her own and the help of a male relative's Y chromosome test.
Banak, who currently is out of the country, and association members have been working for three years, combing through paper maps and documents, and the GPR. At first, the group thought they might find about 40 graves - but they instead found many more.
In an interview last November, he said, "It started out fairly straightforward; the number of unmarked burials shocked us all."
Not only has he found burials of humans, he's also found buried stones. Some of those he's been able to reconnect with their original position.
Zumwalt said the ground scanning project should be completed in August.