CAVE CITY — Hubert Dickey has spent the last 50 years taking care of the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Cave City. It’s what he enjoys doing.
Cedar Grove Cemetery is a small, out of the way cemetery down a curvy, winding road and could be easily forgotten but at least once a month, Dickey drives the 20 minutes from his house to mow and care for the grave sites. Some are his relatives, but the majority is graves for people he never knew.
Dickey was raised in Cave City and now lives in Batesville and says caring for the cemetery was something that got started years ago.
“My dad used to see after it for years,” he said. “It takes about five hours to mow it and you have to use a push mower. I try to mow at least once a month before the holidays and chop down the leaves in the fall. But right now I’d hate to mow it,” he said, fearing it would start a fire.
Now 80, Dickey said he will continue to care for the cemetery as long as his health will allow him and he does all the work for free.
“Once in a while I get a donation. I just put it in a jug and buy gas,” Dickey told the Batesville Daily Guard (http://is.gd/IJOVT8 ). “I do it just because I like it.”
His parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are buried at the grounds.
“That’s my brother. He died in March,” Dickey said, pointing to the grave of Charles Dickey, the latest of his family to be buried there.
The grave is in stark contrast to most of the others that date back to the 1800s. Family names on some of the headstones include Lewallen, Morrow, West, Cason and Young.
“There’s two different King clans buried here — one’s kin to me,” Dickey said.
Some of the headstones appear to be hand-etched into flat rocks. Most of the graves, however, are marked with only field stones.
“Nobody knows who these people are. Even the old timers and (those of) my time didn’t know,” Dickey said, referring to the stones. “A lot of these people buried here may be Indians.”
Dickey said the cemetery is probably the oldest in the area and guesses a lot of the field stone markers represent infants due to being so close together.
“A lot of people traveling through here had a child die and (they) just buried it here in the cemetery,” he said.
He points out what he calls ‘an old grave’ which looks like a coffin made out of stacked rocks and covered with a large rock slab.
“They said they done that on account of wild animals digging the grave up. Probably took six to eight men to move (the top slab),” he said.