Frank Engle spends his days caring for Hillsdale residents located six feet in the ground.
With the formal title of Cemetery Sexton, Engle is responsible for the city’s two final resting places. He is a full-time employee at the Hillsdale Department of Public Services and juggles both the normal labors of the job — such as filling potholes — and his sexton duties, like searching for graves, digging them, and overseeing internment.
“I work in the street department full time. One of my duties is all the jobs and tasks of the sexton,” Engle said. “Some weeks we don’t do anything and some weeks I’m up here every day.”
There are dozens of cemeteries across the County, but the city government oversees just two: Lakeview Cemetery and Oak Grove Cemetery.
The 15- and 38-acre fields keep Engle busy. He aids families in locating graves bought decades ago, digs graves, oversees the internment of bodies, and maintains the properties.
Families will frequently call him and seek help in finding graves of long-dead family members, according to Engle.
“There’s a lot of genealogy and ancestry involved,” he said.
Records for the two cemeteries are often spotty because the cemeteries go back to the 1850s and the city took ownership in the 1950s. Lakeview has a Revolutionary War veteran buried in its ground.
“Some of the records are good and some aren’t. For the most part, we know which graves are used and which ones aren’t and who’s buried where,” he said. “But there are some gaps, and some of the records just didn’t get kept well.”
In his desk at the maintenance building in Hillsdale, Engle has thousands of cards, scribbled with names and locations of graves. Though the information is mostly computerized now, the decades-old cards can help with locating hard-to-find graves.
Oak Grove, right down the street from the College and a frequent destination for dog walkers and runners, has more than 9,000 gravesites, with about 5,000 of them holding a body.
About 300 graves are still for sale, but most are sold and waiting to be filled.
Some portions of the land are unusable, as past sextons confused which way was north. As a result, Engle has to investigate where graves really are from time to time as his records can be wrong, and the layout of the older portions can be confusing. He uses a weighted probe, a heavy pole-like tool, to stick in the ground to hear if a vault is beneath.
“It’s a lot of investigating, you have to be Sherlock Holmes at times,” he said with a laugh. “Sometimes you have to be a psychic to figure out what they were thinking.”
Originally from Jonesville, Engle attended college in Colorado and moved to Hillsdale to marry his wife in 2006.
“I’ve been a land surveyor, so I’ve worked with maps. I do a lot of stuff with maps,” he said. “And I also was in the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, helping with grave registration, so I had some experience with cemeteries. As a matter of fact, I helped design a cemetery at one of the engineering places I worked at.”
Engle attends many burial ceremonies, both for caskets and cremations.
“We usually do about 25 to 30 burials a year between both cemeteries,” he said. “It’s not every week, but I work a lot of Saturdays.”
Digging a grave is complicated. As the City of Hillsdale Director of Public Services Jake Hammel said, “it takes a whole lot of skill sets that come together.”
Engle has to navigate his equipment through the grounds, which can be difficult in the busier areas. Then he uses the probe to ensure there are no surprises beneath, then begins the tedious process of staking out the hole. Using a backhoe, which is a large four-wheel digging vehicle like the ones at construction sites, Engle removes the dirt in the roughly four and a half foot deep hole. If it’s winter, the process is longer with the need to jackhammer through ice and frozen ground.
The hole has to be slightly larger than the vault. A vault is a concrete box that a casket is placed in. Engle said this practice of placing a casket in something more sturdy became the standard in the 1970s.
Engle has seen the importance of the vault as sometimes a casket from decades ago will collapse and the ground above it will sink in.
“One time I was filling a grave in a tight area with the backhoe,” he said, “and I was getting ready to turn. A casket from the 1930s collapsed underneath me and all of a sudden I was looking up at the sky.”
Engle spent the next few hours rescuing his vehicle from the newly formed hole and filling the ground in.
The job is not for the squeamish, he said. Sometimes when digging, a portion of a nearby old casket can collapse or break, and “you’ll get a whiff of a smell you won’t really enjoy.”
“One time some guys were digging a grave, next to an old grave, and some of the dirt fell off as did the side of the coffin,” he said. “You could see who’s in there.”
The job takes heart, he said, because he attends so many burial services. Engle has seen his fair share of emotional situations, from fights breaking out to people becoming so hysterical they have to call an ambulance.
“You have to care,” he said. “It’s part counseling because there will be some very emotional people. We try to maintain the final disposition in a loving, caring way.”
Engle’s supervisor Jake Hammel said the job is difficult, both emotionally and physically, but Engle is a “very dedicated person” who does the job well.
“You’re often dealing with a family that’s suffering when you’re doing the burial process,” Hammel said. “It requires a unique person, a dedicated person, willing to work a few extra hours, to come in early, or work on Saturday.”
He noted the various skills needed for the job from emotional support to engineering and surveying abilities.
Despite the hardships, Engle sees himself serving as sexton for the rest of his career.
“Lord willing my health stays good, I’ll probably be with the city for another 15 years,” Engle said. “I would like to keep doing this because I enjoy it. It’s never the same, that’s for sure.”