Memorial Day Celebration at Lawrenceville Cemetery

By Anne Eickstadt

ANNE EICKSTADT PHOTOS Belvidere Daily Republican
Lawrenceville Cemetery was the site of a 4-H parade as the group moved throughout the cemetery with flags and flowers.

Editor

Sunday, May 20, dawned cloudy, cold, and rainy but the precipitation stopped well before the 2 p.m. scheduled start of the Grasshopper Sweet Clover 4-H Club’s annual Memorial Day celebration at Lawrenceville Cemetery. The cemetery, located on Russellville Road just off Lawrenceville Road, Garden Prairie, holds the final resting sites of military men from wars dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Each year, the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, the Boone County 4-H Sweet Clover Grasshoppers form a parade to march through the cemetery, planting flags at each Veteran’s grave and laying flowers by their headstones.

Due to the coolness of the day this year, the Grasshoppers moved reverently through the cemetery to honor the Veterans and then everyone moved to shelter at Jim and Marilyn Turner’s Carriage Museum (just around the corner) for the rest of the ceremony. Lee Gardner and Marty Deardorff were there to grace us with the song America the Beautiful.

“The Gettysburg Address is always given by an outstanding 4-H-er,” said master of ceremonies Gary Turner as he introduced Miss Emily Saso to do the reading.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

The 4-H Sweet Clover Grasshoppers decorated the graves of Veterans from wars dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” – Abraham Lincoln

Turner then introduced Bonus Township Supervisor Darrel Davis to give a speech.

“Today I looked at the weather and only expected a handful of people to show up. I am impressed by the number of people who came out.”

He touched on the expectations of our Founding Fathers and the Rock of Gibraltar. He discussed how, during World Wars I and II, everyone made sacrifices. The Blue Stars in windows indicating…

For full article, pick up the May 27 BDR.