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Greenwood Boy Scouts Cleaning Up Historical Cemetery

GREENWOOD (KFSM) – The Boy Scouts of Troop 1989 spent part of Sunday (Feb. 7) cleaning up the Sand Ridge Blaylock Cemetery. “[This is the] first time using an a...

GREENWOOD (KFSM) – The Boy Scouts of Troop 1989 spent part of Sunday (Feb. 7) cleaning up the Sand Ridge Blaylock Cemetery.

“[This is the] first time using an ax in a community project,” Boy Scout Mark Thiele said, after chopping down several trees.

The group of more than 20 scouts is raking leaves and removing trees to help clean up. Some of the boys said when they started working on the project, it didn’t even look like a cemetery.

“It looked just like any average area of woods,” Boy Scout Michael Doss said.

“Some of the stones were fallen over and it was pretty messy, so we decided to come up and start cleaning it,” Boy Scout William Gaines said.

Assistant Scout Master Glenda Doss said many of the graves belong to people who died in the 1800s, and the boys are working closely with the South Sebastian County Historical Society.

“It’s a very old cemetery. It was in the Civil War era,” Doss said. “And they're going to try to find the ancestors to some of these people."

10-year-old Gaines has been a Boy Scout for half of his life, and is proud to help preserve the history.

“It helps the community look a lot better,” he said.

Doss said the troop needs two more weekends with good weather to finish the project.

“When you get this many hands going, it goes pretty quick,” she said.

Doss said The University of Arkansas is collecting data on the cemetery to see if there are any unmarked graves at the cemetery.

Troop 1989 formed in March of 2015.

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