In a message dated 9/8/2005 10:03:54 P.M. US Eastern Standard Time, jlfelix24@yahoo.com writes: I sit back and just watch this list a lot, but I decided to chime in this time--about Madison county. You know what? Based on the posts I have read on this board, I have gotten the impression that most of you here live in counties that have governments that have NOTHING to do with maintaining and MOWING the cemeteries, let alone restoring them. The impression I am getting from a fair number of folks here is that private individuals put in their money and time to "save" this or that cemetery and then they find some loving and caring individual to maintain it and mow it in perpetuity. That very few of your counties have any funded governmental system, volunteer or otherwise to identify and restore, much less maintain the old cemeteries. Thus in many counties, people like you whom I am responding to, fix up whole cemeteries, including research, clearing of vegetation, landscaping, fencing, etc, to as near original as humanly possible with donations from private concerns or individuals or out of your own pocket and then pay someone out of your own pockets or are lucky enough to have some very caring and careful volunteers, who mow and maintain the cemeteries you restore to a higher standard than we individuals here in Madison county are able to do. You don't have to worry about private contractors working for the local government, being paid by the job, and driving Zero-turn radius Xmart, or Skagg mowers that cut grass at 10 mph, and have a mower deck made from 1/4" thick steel, running into any, let alone some number of headstones and damaging them. That's great. But at the same time the same individuals are concerned that there are many cemeteries they can't fix or maintain. They see cemetereis that are decaying and they know they can't get to them. Here is our list of cemeteries _Cemetery List_ (http://www.cemeteries-madison-co-in.com/list.htm) . The vast majority of those listed that are not designated as "destroyed" have been restored and are maintained by the county using paid contractors. And the list is complete for the whole county based on the information we have now, though as happens at times, we are just now finding out about another one that may eventually be added to the list. But then again, the list in my old reference from the early days of the MCC has the Cottrell cemetery listed as "destroyed". Who are the great people that maintain the cemeteries you restore? People that do it out of love and not money for decades and take such great care with the work you have done? Rob Hains