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Aug 31, 2023

Cemetery team Plutt/Allred preserve history

Pikes Peak Courier Reporter Rather than haunt cemeteries, Steve Plutt comes to repair, to restore damaged headstones and lift the ones which have sunk partway into the ground. Trained in headstone

Pikes Peak Courier Reporter

Rather than haunt cemeteries, Steve Plutt comes to repair, to restore damaged headstones and lift the ones which have sunk partway into the ground.

Trained in headstone repair, Plutt and his sidekick, Linda Allred, scout the cemetery once a week to look for and fix damaged headstones.

“I found this work so fascinating,” said Allred, who is a member of the city’s historic preservation committee while Plutt is a volunteer.

Earlier this month, on a routine repair mission, they noticed that two headstones were badly damaged, one split into two pieces, the other moved a few feet from the original location in the shade of a spruce tree. The tree is missing a piece of bark.

Woodland Park Police Chief Chris Deisler stated in a press release that damage was caused when a driver lost control of a vehicle Aug. 17.

“On the 21st, we received a call made by the responsible party, a local resident,” the release said. “She called the incident in to her insurance company after the damage was discovered believing that to be the proper course of action.

“We have verified this and have determined the insurance company and city have simply not been able to connect to begin reimbursement on behalf of the subject. This case is being reclassified as a traffic accident case and there are no pending criminal charges being sought against the driver at this time.”

One of the damaged headstones marked the graves of Annamae and Paul Hathaway, with words engraved by the family. “With grateful hearts Mom & Dad. Paul, Roger, Diane & Lynne.”

Plutt contacted Nate Hathaway, grandson of the Hathaways, who visits the gravesite occasionally with his children.

“My grandparents lived on 32 acres adjacent to the property of Gordon Jackson,” said Hathaway, speaking at the cemetery last week. “I grew up there.”

Roger is Nate’s late father; Diane and Lynne are his aunts.

Paul Hathaway was a well-known artist whose metal sculpture of a buffalo is on the grounds of the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

“My grandfather’s sculptures are all around the world,” Nate said.

Paul designed the headstone with an image of one of his sculptures, of two figures holding hands. A pile of native rocks adjacent to the headstone have been there since Paul died.

“My grandfather collected rocks from our property on S0uth Forty Road,” said Nate, who lives in Colorado Springs.

After his grandfather’s death Sept. 1, 2003, the family arranged the rocks at the gravesite. Allred and Plutt will use special epoxy to put the pieces back together.

The second headstone, the one displaced by the vehicle, marked the graves of Mabel Middaugh and her daughter, Edna Middaugh Michels.

“Mabel was the janitor at the school in Woodland Park during the 1930s,” said Plutt, who knows just about everything about people who made the place hum back in the day. “Her daughter, Edna, was the telephone operator in town.”

Just over yonder from Middaugh’s headstone is that of Tom Foster who was Mabel’s stepfather, Plutt said. According to the headstone, Foster lived from 1857 to 1931.

“Tom was the mayor of Woodland Park,” Plutt said.

Plutt has special tools to move the headstone to its original location. Before the interruption this month, the two had restored the gravesite of Diane and Norman Turner.

“This headstone had completely toppled off of its base,” Plutt said. “The base was sunken and leaning; we raised and leveled it, then put the headstone back on with special monument/headstone epoxy.”

The work presents a trip back in time for Allred and Plutt who experience weekly history lessons in granite.

Pikes Peak Courier Reporter

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