Located high on the bluffs in southeastern Minnesota’s driftless area, overlooking the City of Rushford and the Root River, Oakwood Cemetery was originally established and plotted in November 1870 by Charles D. Sherwood, the fourth and youngest Lt. Governor of Minnesota. It is unknown how many burials took place at the cemetery. The Oakwood Cemetery, which encompasses almost 5 acres of south Rushford bluff land, has been abandoned and neglected for decades.
Crew Leader Anne Ketz, Operations Director Brooke Tapp and crew members Lexi Kosik and Jennifer Sustar reset a fallen stone fence post.
Rachel Ukkestad’s husband, Glenn “Mush” Ukkestad, grew up in Rushford and rediscovered the cemetery while working for the MN Department of Transportation (MNDOT) in the 1960s. In their later years, Rachel and Glenn agreed they wanted to be buried in the forgotten cemetery and when Glenn died in March 2012, Rachel made it her mission to restore the cemetery and lay her husband to rest there. She formed the Oakwood Cemetery Association, along with family and other interested Rushford citizens. The Association has worked to establish an access road, has gained deed to the cemetery property, and to restore the cemetery grounds for future burials.
The overgrown Sherwood family plot of the cemetery was highest priority for the Northern Bedrock
crew, which required clearing the plot of trees and brush first. Fifteen stone fence posts, at varying degrees of stability, enclosed the perimeter of the plot. The crew was tasked with straightening and resetting the fallen fence posts and cleaning the posts and headstones within the plot. The crew was also asked to survey the remaining 4.75 acres of land for additional headstones, map their location, clear brush around their vicinity and clean or reset any accessible stones.
The crew cleaned and reset a variety of stones as well as cleared brush and vegetation in and around the designated plots.
Stone Fence Repair
The crew’s primary focus was the main Sherwood plot located at the highest part of the 5-acre cemetery property, overlooking the south Rushford Village valley. Stone fence posts originally surrounded the Sherwood site, with iron rod running between the posts at three levels. 15 posts were found in the area, twelve of which were still standing when the crew arrived and three of which were found nearly buried where they fell from their original position. The crew reset the 3 fallen stone posts and straightened 3 more posts that were at risk of falling. The crew also cleaned all 15 posts using the techniques learned at the Cemetery Preservation Workshop. The entire area encompassed within the stone posts was roughly 19’ x 39’.
A view of the Sherwood monument after brush had been cleared around it at the Oakwood (Sherwood) Cemetery in Rushford Village, MN.
Stone Monument Cleaning & Resetting
In addition to the stone fence posts, the Sherwood plot contained two stone monuments, one obelisk originally placed on a large stone base. The obelisk, measuring 6’-0” high to its point, had at one time fallen or been pushed from its base and was situated on the ground adjacent to the base. The crew cleaned both pieces but did not have the proper equipment to lift the extremely heavy obelisk back into position. Nearby the obelisk was a small die-in-socket type marker. This marker was visibly newer, though it was dated 1865, it is unknown when it was replaced. This stone was also cleaned, though required little work because of its newness. The crew cleaned an additional 4 stone die-in-socket type monuments of various sizes, which were located in another portion of the 5-acre property away from the Sherwood plot. All of these had fallen or been removed from their sockets at some point and were very fragile. The crew had not been trained in, nor had the proper materials to epoxy the stones back in their sockets, so they were cleaned and placed o the ground on wood logs next to their original stone sockets for future epoxy work.
Historic landscape restoration and clearing
The Oakwood Cemetery had been neglected for decades and many invasive trees had taken over the bluff and encroached on the cemetery plots. In the Sherwood plot 75% of the tree cover was cleared, covering roughly 1,000 square feet of land. An additional 1,000 square feet of 5’ wide paths was cleared of brush and fallen trees for a combined total of around 2,000 square feet of trees and vegetation cleared.
Survey & Mapping
The crew surveyed the entire 5 acre cemetery using a methodical grid pattern to survey the land and ground cover for protruding stones. The crew leader and crew members documented and measured the locations and dimensions of discovered sites and stones for the Oakwood Cemetery Association’s records.