During a quick walk through the 200-year-old Mount Jackson Cemetery along North Tibbs Avenue, you can see names on headstones that westsiders usually see on street signs.
Names like Harding, Stout and Mickley adorn many granite obelisks and headstones there. Most look like they were placed at the cemetery recently, although some have begun to crumble or started to lean.
Elsewhere in the cemetery, headstones made of less durable materials, like limestone and sandstone, are broken, fading or disintegrating. Those include the final resting places of hundreds of veterans, Black residents and eastern European immigrants who lived in nearby neighborhoods.
For the past three years, Gary Dean and his landscaping crew have made a weekly trek to Wayne Township during grass-growing season at the Mount Jackson Cemetery.
About 1,000 people may be buried there, and the crew’s main job is to trim the edges around each of the headstones, obelisks and other markers still remaining.
“We try to get it as close around the stones as we can and then out away from them so the mowers don’t have to get too close,” Dean said.
According to the official Wayne Township history, the cemetery has been used since the early 1800s. It was later declared abandoned after a church associated with the cemetery closed.
But neither the church nor subsequent cemetery owners set up a perpetual care fund, like cemeteries are now required to do, that would pay for maintenance.
Wayne Township is required by state law to maintain it indefinitely. But according to Trustee Jeb Bardon, it receives no money from the state to do so.
The township has to pay between $30,000 and $35,000 out of its budget each year to maintain the cemetery, including to hire Dean’s landscaping crew.
“It’s sort of an unfunded mandate in the sense that it’s on the taxpayers of the township to care for it,” Bardon said.
Now the township, which has already reduced its budget and cut costs due to state property tax changes, is looking for help from the community to prevent the cemetery from deteriorating.
“It would help us to have new funds injected from outside, but that’s not happening,” Bardon said.
Bardon hopes he can get support from the community in the form of monetary donations and other help to improve the cemetery by installing security cameras, learning more about the cemetery’s history and repairing or replacing headstones.
“That cemetery tells a story about where we were 200 years ago. That’s a story that shouldn’t be forgotten,” he said.
Lots of issues at the cemetery
Wayne Township has to care for the 15-acre cemetery, including parts of an old cemetery for patients at the former Central State Hospital across Tibbs Avenue that died in the hospital’s care. A large memorial commemorates 575 patients who may be buried there.
The work is too much for Dean’s three-person crew to do in a day. They spread the work across a week. Another crew mows the cemetery’s lawn.
“We have to work around a lot of wind damage that happens to trees. We got a lot of trash along the street. Unfortunately, it’s almost a daily thing,” Dean said.
The township uses the Wayne Township Fire Department’s facilities crew to help dispose of fallen branches. They use the department’s wood chipper to clear the cemetery grounds.
“We try to do all that internally because it’s baked into our other costs. We’re out there working. We don’t hire outside help on that,” Bardon said.
But a lack of dedicated cemetery expertise over decades has led to many damaged headstones.
Some have cracked in half or broken off their base. An uneven landscape also threatens to topple over some stones that weigh hundreds of pounds.
“Freezing and thawing pushes the base of the stone up out of the ground, which is why you have stones that are pointing in every direction imaginable,” Bardon said.
Leaning and toppled headstones at Mount Jackson Cemetery July 14, 2026. Credit: Enrique Saenz/Mirror Indy
The township has reached out to headstone restoration specialists across the state to find out what the township’s facilities crew can do to repair the leaning headstones and ones that have already toppled over.
Many headstones at the cemetery have wide concrete bases that require a lot of time and effort to reset.
“You have to dig all of that up and then reset it, and so that’s obviously a huge job just for one, and it’s a costly one at that. It’s probably about $2,000 per headstone,” said Jeff Harris, director of communications for Wayne Township.
Bardon said the township will attempt to figure out how to do the work within the township’s current budget. It will send the township’s facilities director to a three-day class to learn how to reset the headstones by hand.
“We’re working to acquire some equipment, because a lot of it is just hand-hoisting. In essence, you create a pulley and chain system to be able to lift up the stones and take them apart carefully,” Bardon said.
How Wayne Township became a caretaker
The Mount Jackson Cemetery may have been used for burials as early as the late 1700s. It was part of a 160-acre property originally owned by Israel Harding, one of the county’s original land owners who later also served as state representative.
A church known as the Little Eagle Creek Baptist Church was built somewhere on the property, although its exact location is unknown. It was the cemetery’s original caretaker.
The land later traded hands among Harding’s descendents.
A Civil War veteran named William H. Speer married into the family and became the cemetery’s owner. He and caretaker Adam Ault, who is buried at the cemetery, were later indicted as part of a grave robbing scheme in 1902.
According to police, they and accomplices would steal the bodies from the Mount Jackson Cemetery to sell to local medical schools for dissection or examination. To keep families and pallbearers from noticing the change in weight, they would replace the bodies with large blocks of ice.
The two were never convicted. Speer’s wife, Sarah, died in 1906. He died in 1910.
Ollie Baus, the Wayne Township Trustee in 1967, said Sarah Speer may have left the cemetery land to the township in her will, but litigation by family members after their death makes that unclear.
The township began maintaining the cemetery in the 1960s, and still does today.
A lack of burial information
Over the decades, many of the west side’s early residents were buried at Mount Jackson Cemetery, but the cemetery’s records are incomplete.
Bardon said a fire in the 1960s destroyed many of the township’s cemetery records.
“What we have in terms of records is based primarily off of visible headstones,” Bardon said. “(In the 1980s,) a Scout troop went out and recorded all the information they could gather off the headstones and put it into a spreadsheet. And that’s the limit, basically, of what we have right now in terms of records.”
The cemetery, like the city itself, was segregated. Black residents were kept apart from white residents, even in death.
The “colored” portions of the cemetery are in sections 6 and 12, the sections in the southwest part of the cemetery furthest away from its entrances. When the cemetery expanded, Black residents continued being buried at the rear of the cemetery, in sections 15 and 16.
Many of the Black residents’ graves in the older sections are unmarked. Those stones that remain are either illegible or are dilapidated.
The cemetery also contains the resting places of some of the west side’s eastern European residents that began arriving in the late 1800s. Some markers are written in Romanian or Cyrillic script.
How to help
Bardon said the township is in the early stages of marshalling support for Mount Jackson Cemetery care.
“We feel that we have people who care, and who are interested in getting involved. If we get organized and do this the right way, I think there are some philanthropic groups out there who might help,” he said.
Ben Davis High School, United Auto Workers, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and other organizations throughout the township have helped care for the cemetery by picking up trash and clearing brush and fallen tree branches.
But not everyone that wants to help needs to contribute muscle power. Bardon said they’re looking for help in other ways, too.
“One of the goals that we have in mind is to do research on Mount Jackson Cemetery in terms of a genealogical study to try and identify all of the graves there,” he said. “Everybody can chip in.”
To help provide a donation, volunteer or to figure out how you can help, email the Wayne Township Trustee’s Office at info@waynetwp.org.
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Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on Bluesky at @enriquesaenz.bsky.social.
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