09/03/2026
One duty of township trustee’s offices throughout our state.
Allen McCloskey spent 73 years digging graves across rural Indiana. Now retired at 92, he has a new problem: who is going to take care of the abandoned Civil War-era cemetery he has been maintaining on his own for the past 15 years?
Indiana has more than 20,000 cemeteries. Many are abandoned, overgrown or nearly impossible to find. State law puts township trustees in charge of maintaining them, but some trustees don’t even know the sites exist.
In Porter County, Center Township Trustee Jesse Harper discovered an abandoned family cemetery this year only after a surveyor flagged it while reviewing a farmstand expansion request. The site has been buried under decades of soil and underbrush.
Funding, access and technical expertise all stand in the way of restoring neglected cemeteries. Clean up can cost thousands of dollars and requires specialists smaller townships cannot afford. Some sites sit entirely on private land with no legal access point.
If you come across an abandoned cemetery in Indiana, contact your township trustee.
Reporting by Carson Ge**er
