Friends of the Cemetery

Spring Grove Cemetery is one of Medina’s Victorian gems. Its carefully preserved and maintained condition is due in no small part to the efforts of two individuals. Both suffered the painful loss of loved ones and both responded by making outsized contributions to the cemetery in different ways.

The first was Teresa Merkle. In 1995 her newborn infant died. Little Megan was buried in the Baby Section of Spring Grove and Teresa visited the grave frequently. In doing so Merkle noted that “things did not seem to be going well” in the cemetery. The grass was not mowed regularly, and a sense of seediness and disrepair seemed to prevail.

Spring Grove, created in 1883, had originally been something of a show place in the village of Medina. It was part of the rural cemetery movement which gained favor in the middle 1800s, inspired by the Romantic movement and its aesthetic taste for pastoral beauty. Cemeteries became landscaped parks with ponds and curving paths – popular places for Sunday afternoon carriage rides. Medina’s Spring Grove, with its elegant sandstone archway and inspiring 1881 Soldiers’ Monument, is a prime example.

So Merkle wrote a letter to then Mayor Jim Roberts, expressing her concern. Roberts paid attention. He too had lost a child. He quickly revived the defunct Medina Cemetery Commission and appointed her chairperson.

A small article about this in a local paper had a surprising effect.

“People started coming out of the woodwork,” Merkle said at the time.

One of those individuals was Cynthia Szunyog, whose family had lived in Medina for generations.

This group was committed to the idea that “something had to be done.” One of their earliest efforts was to hire a full-time sexton to oversee burials (the city did not have burial equipment) and to perform maintenance (the city was contracting out grass cutting and snow plowing).

In 1997 a Master Plan was funded by a donation of $20,000 from the Letha House Foundation. An advocacy group was founded by Merkle and Szunyog. They called it the Friends of the Cemetery. The first meeting was held in the chapel at Spring Grove and was attended by 15 people.

This group decided to take on the preservation of the Old Town Graveyard as well and began soliciting funds from charitable foundations and community groups for improvements to the cemeteries. In early 1999 they became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

The second person to play an important role in the restoration of Spring Grove was Edward C. Mears of Marble Falls, Texas. One evening in 2002 as Mears wandered about Spring Grove visiting family graves and mourning the recent death of his wife, Pat, he had a chance encounter with John Gill, a member of the Friends. They spoke. Gill told Mears about this new group. Mears listened closely.

Following that encounter, Mears contacted Cathi Carmany, head of the FirstMerit Trust Department. It turned out that Mears possessed a personal worth of millions and with the death of his wife, had nowhere to leave his money. Through Carmany he received information and counsel about the Friends organization.

Mears was hardly a stranger to Medina. Formerly a resident, he was responsible for the development of the Rustic Hills subdivision and its country club. Even though he left Medina to pursue ranching in Texas, he always maintained his connection with the community.

In early 2003 Mears announced that he had terminal cancer and that he decided to leave his entire estate of $3 million to the Friends.“Money, land, cattle, donkeys, horses – everything,” Merkle said.

He died in April, 2003. And he had just a few specific requests of the Friends:• The completion of the hard-edged lake project with a columbarium wall

• A special garden with a bench in memory of his wife Pat

• An enhancement of the Baby Section

• A memorial to his father, Amos Mears and his contemporaries from the 1950s and 1960s who helped build the industrial section of Medina.

All of these were honored. The memorial for his father came in the form of the brick Amos Mears Memorial office complex which houses the sexton, the Medina City Parks Department, and the Friends of the Cemetery.

In 2021 Spring Grove officially became an Arboretum. It is recognized as such in the Morton Register of Arboreta, a database of the world’s arboreta and gardens.

“We have over 600 trees and 100 different species” Merkle said.

And in 2022 Spring Grove Cemetery was accepted into the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. It honors four Medina residents buried in the cemetery who actively assisted freedom seekers and participated in the resistance to slavery – Harrison Gray Blake and his wife Elizabeth, and Herman and Martha Canfield.