Crash destroys historic headstones
CRANBERRY TWP — An SUV that crashed into the cemetery at St. John's Lutheran Church on Freedom Road damaged more than a dozen headstones that may be irreplaceable, according to administration at the church.
The vehicle skidded down Freedom Road just before 6 a.m. Friday morning and collided with a number of stones, some of which dated back to before the Civil War.
Cranberry Township Police responded to the accident. Lt. Chuck Mascellino said that the driver sustained minor injuries, and the vehicle was towed away.
Bill Vickinovac, treasurer of the St. John's church council, said the material in the damaged tombstones could be up to 200 years old, and that some of the marble may have come from overseas quarries that may no longer be in operation.“To get that replaced, I can't even imagine,” he said. “It's not really replaceable. It will get substituted for something else.”Vickinovac said the church's former pastor, who died of COVID-19 in January, had previously made maintaining the cemetery and making sure that old headstones were readable a church project.“Now it's gone backwards. We're definitely going to try and rebuild and put everything back,” he said. “We can't even guess how much it's going to cost.”The cost and how much the church will be responsible for will be decided between the church's insurance company and the driver's insurance company. Vickinovac doesn't expect to have answers on that front for some time.“It could be a year or two before we know anything,” he said. “We're not expecting a fast decision.”
The land on which St. John's sits originally belonged to the Otto family farm, and the cemetery started as a personal family plot, said Ed Dengel, president of the church council.The family donated two acres of land in the 1820s to create a church. The German Lutheran congregation at the site was started in 1869.The church celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2019, before the pandemic. The congregation usually sees 50 people on Sundays, and members number about 100.“This church has been here a long time,” Dengel said.Dengel also doesn't have a solid idea of how much the repairs will cost, or how they will be done.“We have to get insurance companies in here to hash this out,” he said. “It costs a terrific amount to put stones back on the bases. We've had the tops of stones fall over before, and be put back on.”Past quotes for repairing stones had called for $1,000 per stone.“Some of these stones look like they are beyond repair,” he added.The church is also working to identify whether any of the people whose headstones were destroyed have local family members. Dengel hopes to reach out to local historians and find a cemetery plot record to identify which stones go where.“We don't know if there is any family still in the area,” Vickinovac said. “I haven't heard anything. There are a lot of unknowns.”“We want to honor the people buried here and honor their memory, and get this cleaned up too,” Dengel said.
