Top Stories Headline News
	TRR Archive the Rue Morgue
	Editorials Editorials Columns Letters
	Arts & Leisure Reviews & Schedules
	Outdoors Fishing/Hunting Outdoor Magazine
	Sports Local Scores & Standings
	Food Recipes for culinary delights
	Bridges Bridges of the Upper Delaware
	Back Issues
	Search
	Links
	Commerce Sponsors
	Classified Ads Find it here
	Staff Pages
	Masthead
	Design Studio
	Subscriptions Get your copy delivered

Thursday, August 15, 1996, p. 2.
"In Brief"
Related story here

---

Standing up the Joneses

By MARK ALDRICH

MONTICELLO -- The 10-foot-tall gravestones of John P. Jones, his brother, Samuel F. Jones, and John's wife, Phoebe, were set back upright on August 9, just in time for a graveside ceremony honoring the village's rounding family.

Members of the Monticello Masonic Lodge, whose members compose the larger part of the Joint Founders' Cemetery Committee, were surprised at the ceremony on August 12 to see the stones standing up on their bases.

"Just as the energy behind starting the restoration was strong, the energy to stand the stones up was strong," lodge secretary and history committee chair Tom Rue said.

George Dexheimer and Thomas Warren of the Liberty Lodge raised the stones. This came on top of cleanup work done by about 20 other volunteers who were honored at the service.

Several volunteers are clients participating in a citizenship group run by the county's Division of Social and Community Hygiene Services out of the Rhulen-Markel building in Monticello.

The obelisks are cracked in many places, but are upright for the first time in years. Although the writing on each of the stones is largely worn away, with further cleaning the words on the stones may be recovered in the future.

Speakers at the ceremony included Norman Moon and Gary Henningsen of the NYS Grand Lodge, judge Burton Ledina, River Reporter senior editor Bert Feldman, Mental Health Services director Robert Havlena, Anthony Lubniewski, David Silverman, Jens Meyer, and Arnold Levy.

Henningsen, grand secretary of the NYS Grand Lodge, said his organization is doing much restoration work statewide. They have restored the state lodge's library in New York City, which he said is "19 floors of antiquity," and one of George Washington's local headquarters, in Tappan.

"You have to know history and be proud of it," he said. "We Americans kind of destroy rather than restore. Perhaps we'll learn; there's so much to be proud of."