Lehigh Valley's First Green Cemetery to Open Near Fountain Hill
The Board of Fountain Hill Cemetery has announced the official opening of Green Meadow, the first and only green cemetery in the greater Lehigh Valley and one of just six in Pennsylvania.
An opening event will take place at Fountain Hill Cemetery, on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012, at 12:15 p.m. The cemetery is located at 1121 Graham St., in Salisbury Township, on the Fountain Hill border.
Situated within historic Fountain Hill Cemetery, Green Meadow is a quarter-acre natural burial ground of native wild flowers and grasses where the deceased are given green – or natural – burials. Unembalmed bodies are returned to the earth in vaultless graves and in caskets made from readily biodegradable materials, like pine, wicker, or cardboard. Graves are marked with indigenous fieldstones that are laid flush to the ground.
The purpose is to allow remains to degrade naturally, rejoin the elements, and become part of the natural cycle of life.
“We are pleased to offer families an opportunity to lay their loved ones to rest in a natural, green manner,” says Ed Vogrins, president of the Board of the Fountain Hill Cemetery. “And with the meadow in full bloom and the woods rising behind it, Green Meadow couldn’t be a more beautiful place to do it.”
In planning and designing this first phase of Green Meadow, the Board consulted with Mark Harris, a Bethlehem resident and author of the signature book on green burial, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us).
“Green Meadow joins a green burial movement that’s changing modern funeral practices across the country,” says Harris. “Now Lehigh Valley families have a local cemetery where burials can be greener, simpler and more celebratory affairs.”
The opening event will include brief remarks by Vogrins and Harris, and acknowledge the involvement of community members, including Moravian College and Spillman-Farmer Architects. Local cyclist and Spillman-Farmer architect, Pat Ytsma, was buried at Green Meadow in December 2011, the cemetery’s first green burial.
Green Meadow joins Philadelphia’s West Laurel Hill and the Pittsburgh-region’s Penn Forest in bringing green burial to Pennsylvania.
For more information, contact Ed Vogrins: 610-868-4840; Mark Harris, 610-954-8375, dmarkharris@earthlink.net, www.gravematters.us.
A web page is under construction: www.greenmeadowpa.org
jennifer
8:50 am on Thursday, September 20, 2012
I think this is an awesome idea!
yes
1:20 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
seems like a recipe for dogs to start digging where the odors of decay start to rise
jan
1:26 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
hmmm & this is all legal? Wonder what the funeral homes have to say about this!! not too sure I would go along with it.
Annonymous
2:45 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
Finally!
yes
2:47 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
its been open a year
Mary Ellen Alu
2:50 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
This is the 'official' opening
Mark Harris
9:36 am on Friday, September 21, 2012
The first (and so far only) burial at Green Meadow took place last December before the board of directors had finalized rules and regulations, surveyed the property, property sowed the meadow, etc. All that has now been done.
High-On-Lehigh
11:10 pm on Thursday, September 20, 2012
Nice! Sounds like a Jewish cemetery. ('For dust you are and to dust you shall return' - Genesis)
btw - I can assure 'yes' that there are absolutely NO odors after a body is buried 6 feet deep. The important thing is to hold the funeral ASAP after the death.
Mark Harris
9:31 am on Friday, September 21, 2012
In response to some of the comments above:
The burials at Green Meadow are quite legal. Graves at Green Meadow are dug to a depth of four feet, so burials meet the state requirement that the top of the casket sit at least two feet below the surface of the earth. And as the earth that’s dug from a gravesite is returned directly to the grave after interment, an additional two feet of dirt sits atop the casket. (That mound of earth will subside and return to level grade as the biodegradable coffin – and its occupant – decay). There are no odors. Animals do not attempt to dig up remains. If that were the case, they would have plundered our older historic cemeteries, which by default practiced natural burial (i.e., the burial of unembalmed bodies in wood caskets, without the use of burial vaults) until the mid- to late-1800s. For more information, see my book, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us).
As for the reaction of funeral directors: Funeral directors serve families. I think they will welcome the opening of a cemetery that meets the need of families who come to them and ask for green burials.
Mark Harris
Tom Bennett
11:58 am on Friday, September 21, 2012
Snakes ! I hate snakes .
sue
1:12 pm on Friday, September 21, 2012
so happy to hear this, ive been wanting this for my ending. i will have to save this for my family, thank you ")
Julie
12:02 pm on Sunday, February 17, 2013
In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC,
"I want [upon death] to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth."
Why send your carbon into the atmosphere with cremation? Why preserve your body when you could give your atoms/molecules back to the earth? I LOVE this idea.