Mystery Stirs Grave Memories

by Tracy Davis
Workers find a walkway is made from grave markers.

Brian Darwin had pulled the nine granite pavers out of the ground Wednesday night. But it wasn’t until Thursday morning that the Knight’s Grading & Excavating worker, who was readying a westside Ann Arbor home for a sewer line replacement, flipped one of the 100-pound slabs over.

“Beloved Wife, Mother Viola T. Bagnasco, 1901-1969.”

Stunned, he turned over the rest of the stones: All were grave markers.

Image: Bian Darwin (left) and Bob Knight look at some grave headstones they uncovered while working on a sewer line at a home in Ann Arbor

And though they did not need to pull up the remaining 51 1x2-foot slabs that made up the walkway, he and company owner Bob Knight said they are sure they too are grave markers. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Knight said. “Ever. In 25 years in business.”

But where could they possibly have come from, and how did they wind up reincarnated as a walkway at a Westfield Avenue colonial?

The short answer is that it’s likely going to be hard to find out for certain, but it’s very likely that the markers have been, well, recycled.

According to the owner of Arnet’s Becker Burrell, a longtime Ann Arbor area monument maker, adaptive reuse of grave markers when there has been an error or other issue is quite common.

Sometimes, a birthdate is wrong, or there may be family disagreement over certain wording, said Caryl Arnet. Misspellings happen; some stones are never picked up.

And those standard-size, roughly six-inch-thick slabs, which start at $445, make great foundations, fish tank floors, building markers, and evidently also pavers.

“It’s a great material,” Arnet said, adding that she had someone come see her recently who was looking for cast-off granite for a garden wall. And she’s also had police contact her in the past after similar finds, wondering about cemetery robberies or thefts from monument makers.

The house, on Westfield Avenue off of Stadium Boulevard, was built in 1941, according to city tax records, so the walkway is apparently newer, as all of the death dates on the grave markers are in the 1960s.

That the pavers were in fact grave markers was news to brand-new homeowner David Barsan, who with his soon-to-be fiancee closed on the house last Wednesday. He said he is not sure they want to keep the walkway now.

“We just moved in Saturday, and now, five or six days in ... I would hope that these were just misspellings or whatever, but I don’t know,” he said.

Web and database searches by a reporter to find descendants of some of those named on the markers were mostly unsuccessful Thursday. One search turned up a woman who was possibly a daughter of a Mary Kuszak, 1888-1961, who lived north of Detroit, but the number was disconnected and records showed she may have died in 2007.

At least one of the markers appears to be a clear case for a spelling error: “Mother Dorothy J. Pendygrasft 1918-1968.” Searches turned up no Pendygrasft surnames anywhere.

A search for another name, a Hanley Dawson, born in 1888 and who died, according to the marker, in 1962, turned up another Hanley Dawson, president of a major automotive group, living in the Chicago area.

A secretary at The Patrick Dealer Group’s offices listened with interest and said that it must have been a marker for Hanley Sr., who, according to a Chicago Tribune story, was hired by Henry Ford to be the first used car dealer in the nation. Hanley Jr., according to the article, died in 1998 and was a legendary Cadillac dealer in Chicago.

Hanley III, the woman said, is semi-retired and vacationing; Hanley Dawson IV is running the automotive group now. He could not be reached Thursday afternoon however.

Whatever the truth is to the mystery behind how the markers got to be a walkway, Bob Knight said he hoped nothing untoward had happened.

“May they rest in peace,” the excavating company owner said.

Update: Mystery Solved

by Tracy Davis - After The Ann Arbor News published a story Friday about walkway pavers at a home that turned out to be old grave markers, one caller knew how they ended up there: The previous owner of the west side Ann Arbor home.

Image: The grave markers were castaways unusable because of misspellings or other errors

Daneen Mabley, who lived in the Westfield Avenue home with her husband and family for 25 years until 2003, said the couple who owned the house before them installed the walkway.

One of the two, Mabley said, had a relative in the monument-making business. And the high-quality, 1x2-foot slabs they used for the walkway all had typos, misspellings or miscuts, Mabley said.

The couple the Mableys bought the home from disclosed the presence of the markers, which date back to the 1960s, she said. Apparently, the information got lost along the way after a relocation company was involved in transactions with the home.

The granite slabs, some 60 of them, were used to make an attractive walkway for the home, leading from the driveway to the front door. When the newest owners, who just closed on the home last week, had the sewer line replaced earlier this week, contractors discovered the markers.

Local monument makers said Thursday that such recycling is common in pavers, walls, foundations and other projects were sturdy, attractive stone is needed.

http://www.mlive.com/annarbornews/ Original Story

http://www.mlive.com/annarbornews/news/ Update