WAUKESHA COUNTY

Civil War group files a lawsuit to get Wisconsin city to mow grass around graves

Meg Jones

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A Civil War group upset over conditions at a Muskego cemetery that contains Civil War veterans' graves filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to get the city to mow the grass.

The Sons of Union Veterans asked Muskego officials last year to clear weeds and debris from the graves at a tiny cemetery at the southwest corner of Ryan and North Cape roads. The city refused because the small plot is a plant sanctuary and the last native prairie in Muskego.

Dave Daley, a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, shows the headstone of Homer H. Clark, a lieutenant in the 16th U.S. Infantry who died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Chickamauga. The Civil War group says Muskego is not taking proper care of the cemetery where Clark and other Civil War vets are buried.

Muskego clears away some of the plants in the spring with a controlled burn but that also concerns members of the Wind Lake chapter of Sons of Union Veterans.

"From their periodic burnings that they do, it's degraded the (burial) stones where they're about ready to fall apart and tip over," said Bob Koenecke, the group's commander. "We'd like them to stop the burning and we'd like them to clean up the cemetery."

Under Wisconsin law, veterans' graves must "receive proper and decent care" from cemetery owners. The lawsuit filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court Tuesday is seeking a declaratory judgment on whether the way Muskego is caring for the cemetery is proper and decent.

"Our view is that it isn't," said attorney Franklyn Gimbel, who was hired by the Sons of Union Veterans. "If the court agrees with us, then the remedy would be to get in line and get this thing straightened out."

Among the people buried at the cemetery overgrown with tall grass, weeds and plants during the summer is Homer Clark, a lieutenant in the 16th U.S. Infantry who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, and Jonathan W. Smiley, a private in the 22nd Wisconsin Infantry who died of disease during the war.

The half acre holds about 80 graves, mostly people who died in the 1800s and early 1900s, including some of the community's founding families.

"We really didn't want to have to fight about this," said Koenecke, adding that he thinks the cemetery "looks like an abandoned city lot."

"We'd like them to clean it up and honor these veterans' graves. Both of these guys died in battle. Their bodies were embalmed and shipped back home and buried there and we believe this is a desecration of their graves," Koenecke said.

The city has 20 days to respond to the lawsuit.

Muskego has never mowed the grass at the cemetery since taking it over in the mid-1960s; the land is considered a natural area that features Big Bluestem Prairie Grass, Indiangrass, Culver's Root, White Wild Indigo and Shooting Star wildflowers, Muskego city forester Tom Zagar said. To move the plants to another green area in the city would not be the same because it's a remnant prairie and not reconstructed prairie like that at Bong Recreational Area.

When the Sons of Union Veterans, dressed in period uniforms and firing muskets, performed a ceremony last Memorial Day, the city mowed a path to the graves and removed some of the woody plants, Zagar said.

"It's unfortunate that they couldn't understand the important context of the historic vegetation around them. To wear the uniform was a tribute, the guns were a tribute, (and) we felt the plants were a tribute," Zagar said.