Preserving a piece of history: Saratoga resident cleans Cadwell cemetery

Saratoga resident Carl Pigg has an unique hobby.

Hoping to beautify Saratoga’s Cadwell Cemetery, which includes headstones dating back to the 1880s, Pigg has volunteered several hours cleaning, maintaining and adding to the burial grounds in any way possible. He said he started cleaning the cemetery about two or three years ago, focusing first on the large amount of sagebrush that had accumulated over the years.

“I asked the town and cemetery board about it, and they didn’t care if I cleaned it up, so I started two or three years ago chopping the brush out of it,” he said. “For the first year I had gotten about half of it, and in a year or so I cut the rest of it. I just decided that it should be cleaned up, and there was a lot of brush in it at the time. I used to never pay much attention to the cemetery, and I didn’t even know it was out there until they built the dump out there.”

For a newer look, Pigg and fellow resident Don Herold also put in new steel crosses to replace the older, decaying ones made from wood.

“Don made the crosses there out of steel, and the ones in there before were wood and rotten,” Pigg said. “Don built the crosses and welded them together, and I cut them up on his machine and painted them white. We took them out to the cemetery and put them in the ground, and they should last as long or longer as the others did.”

In addition to maintaining the crosses, Pigg also repairs damaged headstones. Some have broken from falling over in the wind or winter weather. He also places rocks around the headstones to better mark each grave.

“Some didn’t have stones around them, so I put stones around two or three of them,” Pigg said. “Now I think there are five or six that don’t have anything around them.”

Pigg also has special plans for burial sites he believes were for two infants.

“My sister-in-law lived in Cody, and she told my wife that she talked to some people up there who had two babies in their family buried at the cemetery,” Pigg said. “There were two circles there together, and I figured those were for the babies. I figured that for whomever the babies were from, they buried them and left. I have just put flowers around it and not cleaned it yet, but I thought I’d take care of that and get the weeds off of it for Memorial Day.”

Enclosing another grave is an old wood fence that Pigg hopes to possibly dispose of and replace.

“That wood has been there a long time, maybe even over 100 years, and it looks like it’s just about to fall down,” Pigg said. “I guess it needs to be taken out, and that rocks should be put in around where I think the grave was. I might get to it this summer.”

The cemetery is on the road to the town landfill, so when Pigg goes out to the landfill, he checks the cemetery.

“I go to the dump once a month or so and look at it as I go out there,” he said. “There needs to be more work done out there, but I’ll get to it,” Pigg said.