Lakewood Lore

Founding father's cemetery gave way to city parking

Parking lots and old graveyards often lock horns in the battle for precious downtown space.

Long ago, in Cleveland, Erie Street Cemetery on East Ninth won out; in Lakewood, the Wagar burial ground, once on the south side of Detroit between St. Charles and Belle Avenues, did not.

But for decades the question of what should be done with pioneer Mars Wagar's God's acre (actually it was a half-acre) was a lively topic of conversation among Lakewoodites.

Some thought of the resting place as "a mournful patch of land in the heart of Lakewood" that should rightfully give way to the currents of economic progress.

Others wanted it reverently restored to become a lasting historical site for those doughty settlers who struggled to build our fledgling community.

The first grave there was dug in 1826 for Lucy Wagar, mother of Mars Wagar. He came here in 1820 and bought 111 acres of land at $7 an acre from Detroit south to Madison between Belle and St. Charles.

Mars was originally from New York State. He was an educated man, a surveyor proficient in mathematics. He spoke several languages and helped put up the first log-cabin schoolhouse in 1830. It was at Detroit and Nicholson.

He opened the cemetery on his property initially as a family plot. Later, he extended its use to pioneer friends and neighbors. The last burial there was in 1894.

Through the years that followed, the cemetery was neglected. Hidden behind a diner, a billboard and a sand bank, it became a catchall for drifting leaves and a dumping ground, littered with tin cans and broken bottles. Eventually, its sixty or so headstones were knocked over by vandals and scattered in disarray.

In 1938, Mars' grandson, who then owned the land, said he could make no improvements because he couldn't dig up the ground until all the bodies had been removed. Unfortunately, there was no register and many of the graves could not be identified.

Finally, in the mid-'50s, to provide municipal off-street parking for Lakewood Hospital, the city bought the property, including a small, adjacent burial strip known as the Kidney family cemetery.

In 1957, workmen excavating for the new parking lot turned up parts of 54 human skeletons. These remains were subsequently reburied in a mass grave at Lakewood Park Cemetery. Headstones, meanwhile, were stored at various locations, with some ending up for all to see today in the herb garden behind the oldest Stone House Museum at Lakewood Park.

Vernon Lieblein, 88-year-old founder of Lakewood Electric Co., remembers a ghoulish boyhood a adventure he had at the cemetery in 1915.

"A teenage friend and I, while snooping around one day, saw that some coffins had been unearthed and broken by equipment used to take salable sand from the sand bank at the edge of the graveyard," Lieblein recalled.

"Next thing we knew we were carrying home two skeletons, which we hid in a chicken coop in my friend's backyard.

"When his father discovered the bones, he was horrified, and after a tongue-lashing, made us return them immediately," said prankster Lieblein.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post August 16, 1990. Reprinted with permission.

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