By Liz McMahan
Expansion of the Fort Gibson National Cemetery is in the planning stages, and officials hope the government will sign contracts within the next three months on a $4 million to $7 million project.
The project will be the third major expansion of the cemetery, said Timothy Spain, cemetery director. The expansion will take the cemetery from 32 acres to 48 acres and should be large enough to serve veterans and their spouses through 2035.
It addition to the expansion, bids are also being solicited on a $1 million millennium project that will straighten the headstones on the 18,900 graves already in the cemetery, Spain said.
Those headstones must be perfectly upright to maintain the symmetrical look that is carried out in all national cemeteries. It is a difficult job to keep up with in the area’s soil, which shifts a lot, Spain said.
Maintenance crews now spend a lot of time aligning stones. The millennium project will provide bases for the stones to be set on to eliminate some of the shifting, he said.
The expanded area will have 1,000 new traditional gravesites, 1,000 sites for cremations and, possibly, a columbarium — a stone wall with niches for burial urns. An additional 3,000 inground crypt sites may also be added as an option in the bidding, Spain said.
The new burial sites will be much closer together than in the past, Spain said.
Burials will be made in liners that are all put into place during construction, he said.
Those liners are seven feet deep and can accommodate two caskets. When the first one is placed in the grave, a shelf is installed over it and the lid placed back on it until it is reopened for the second burial of a spouse, Spain said. Both times, crews will have to remove only the 18 inches of soil on top of the liner.
Not only will the liners eliminate digging the graves as they are needed, it also will allow graves to be much closer together, Spain said.
“We will gain about 1,000 new sites per acre,” he said. “They are no more than one-half inch apart. Now, the traditional graves are 5-by-10 (feet). The new tradtionals will be 4-by-8 and the crypts will be 3-by-8.
“We are just sucking up that middle piece, and by doing that, we’re getting more per acre, which extends the cemetery life,” he said.
There are about 550 burials per year at the Fort Gibson National Cemetery, from 45 to 70 per month, Spain said.
If the cemetery continued using the old method of digging each grave, the expanded area would last until about 2030, he said.
