Kevin Vought arrived at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, weed trimmer in tow.

He would not leave the Braddock Road Avenue graveyard for more than nine hours.

Vought is one of two volunteers cutting the grass at the cemetery since it lost its grass cutting service last year.

Since then, bids for a new grass cutting service have come in nearly twice as expensive — a financial burden the cemetery association says it cannot bear.

A solution may be in sight for the cemetery, following a cheaper rate offered by a grass cutting service Tuesday. But whether the cemetery association will accept the offer is still up in the air.

Difficult task at hand

Vought, president of the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery Association, is at the cemetery most evenings after work and all day on his days off. His son, Brian, helps out when he isn’t busy with work or his children’s activities.

Even the grandkids pitch in from time to time, Vought said.

“My grandson who is 6, he helps weed wack,” said Vought, 52, of Mt. Pleasant.

The 27-acre cemetery has between 10,000 and 12,000 headstones, said Rick Meason, one of five volunteer cemetery association board members.

“And it’s all on a hill, so that makes it even more difficult (to cut),” said Meason of Youngwood.

Vought and his son split the cemetery into 10 sections, cutting one at a time. They pick up trash and take a weed trimmer to sections that cannot be cut with one of their two riding lawn mowers.

It usually took a five-person professional maintenance crew three to five days to cut the entire property, Meason said.

Now, it takes the Voughts two to three days to finish cutting one section, Kevin Vought said.

“We only have two riding mowers, and if one goes down, we’re pretty much in a real bind,” he said. “And they’ve been running constantly, 24/7, since March.”

The nearly record-high levels of rain seen in the Pittsburgh area this spring didn’t help the situation.

The Pittsburgh region experienced 7.93 inches of rain in April — just 0.18 inch behind the all-time wettest April on record, according to the National Weather Service. That’s nearly 6 inches more than April 2023 and nearly 5 inches more than April 2022.

“If we could get a little cooperation from the weather here,” Meason said, “it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Crunching the numbers

The cemetery’s former maintenance service charged $2,000 per cut. Crews cut between 12 and 18 times from April to October, Meason said — meaning the cemetery paid $24,000 to $36,000 per year for grass cutting.

With new bids offering $3,500 per cut, that increases annual grass cutting costs to between $42,000 and $63,000 per year, he said.

A grass cutting service offered a cheaper rate Tuesday, Meason said, but he wouldn’t provide specifics.

“We are strongly considering hiring this company to cut the cemetery at least once a month — twice if we can pull enough money,” he said. “We plan on making a public announcement once everything is finalized.”

The cemetery receives $700 per lot purchased, a $125 fee from the company that pours the foundation for the headstone and about $500 to open and close the grave.

There are also two gas wells on the property, Vought said, but they don’t produce as much as when they were first drilled.

Revenue goes into a perpetual care fund at a local bank, where it accrues interest, Meason said.

“That fund is there to grow interest so that we can use the money for maintenance in the cemetery, and most of the money we get goes toward cutting grass,” he said.

Burials on the decline

But with fewer people purchasing lots at the cemetery in recent years, revenue is harder to come by.

Nearly 61% of people who died across the country in 2023 opted for cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America based in Wheeling, Ill. The association — which has collected cremation data in the United States and Canada for 25 years — predicts more than 65% of deaths will result in cremation by 2028.

Vought was unable to provide the number of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery lots purchased in recent years, but he has noticed fewer purchases in his seven years on the board.

“Nowadays, most people are getting cremated. If we sell one plot to someone, they can get two cremation burials in that plot,” he said. “We’re sort of losing money, because you can get two into one plot.”

The cemetery also falls outside of the state Small Games of Chance Law, meaning it can’t host its own fundraisers, Meason said.

“We could raise the prices, but the problem with that is we don’t want to price ourselves out of competition with other local cemeteries,” he said. “It’s kind of a Catch 22. If you raise the prices, people won’t want to be buried in your cemetery anyway.”

Community members coming together to form a Friends of the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery nonprofit is one potential solution to the problem, Meason said.

Community pitches in

Bev Lazor and her husband, Dale, have maintained the grass surrounding their loved ones’ gravesites at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery since the fall of 2019.

“We try to get here every month, but that’s kind of hard with work,” said Bev Lazor of Norvelt. “(We come) as often as we can get here.”

The Lazors tended to the gravesites of Bev’s mother, grandparents, aunt and uncle Memorial Day weekend, pulling weeds, clearing debris off the headstones and decorating with artificial flowers.

“This is their place of rest,” Bev Lazor said. “You have to respect it and make it nice. It shouldn’t look so bad.”

The cemetery is a focal point of the borough, Dale Lazor said.

“This is the city. It’s Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. You drive by, people see — ‘Oh, wow, look at that,’ ” he said. “You want to be proud of your town, especially for their resting place. That’s the bottom line.”

Larry Galley was disappointed to see the state of the cemetery Memorial Day weekend. He and his son, Brian, went to trim the weeds around a handful of family members’ gravesites after reading about the grass cutting plight on the cemetery association’s Facebook page.

“I don’t know who’s in charge now, but they’re not doing a very good job,” said Galley, 85, of Scottdale. “It’s a shame, because it’s an old cemetery. You would’ve thought they would have some money in reserve somehow.”

Three generations of Galley’s family are buried at the cemetery, including his grandfather, father and mother.

‘Preserving our history’

The cemetery’s historical ties are what drew Meason to becoming a board member a decade ago.

“To me, the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery is the most historic place in the town because that’s where all of our forefathers are,” said Meason, president of the Mt. Pleasant Area Historical Society. “There’s some very interesting, very prominent people that are laid to rest up there, and they helped build our town.

“To me, it’s absolutely essential for preserving our history to take care of the place so that future generations can go up there, they can see the monuments and hopefully be inspired to look up some of the names, see what these people did,” he said.

Veterans who served in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the present day are buried at the cemetery — including more than 130 Civil War veterans who represented 12 states.

Vought is concerned about the future of the cemetery. But until another solution is reached, he will continue cutting the grass.

“I don’t want to stop doing it,” he said, “because if I do, I don’t think anybody else is going to step up to the plate and do that.”

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