A rendering shows what the columbariums at Greenlawn Cemetery will look like. A columbarium is a place where cremated ashes can be interred in lieu of burial.
Photo provided by city of Franklin
Projects at Greenlawn Cemetery will add a new burial option and repair old gravestones.
Franklin Parks and Recreation, which manages Greenlawn, requested and received $173,000 from the Franklin City Council last week to build the first of several columbariums and to repair headstones in the military section of the cemetery.
Columbariums
A columbarium is a structure where cremated ashes can be placed, similar to an outdoor mausoleum. This is an option for people who want to be cremated but don’t want to sit on a loved one’s mantle, and also don’t want to be buried. Instead, people will be able to purchase a niche or a set of niches at the columbarium where their ashes can be interred.
Adding this new burial option is needed for the cemetery because a growing number of people are choosing cremation over burial, said Chip Orner, Franklin parks director.
The columbariums will be placed on a plot of land that the city bought in 2020 from Compass Park for $150,000. The columbariums will be north of the Masonic gravesite, which is marked by rows and rows of identical tombstones reserved for the burial of Masons and Compass Park residents.
The first columbarium will cost $105,000 to install, including roughly $80,000 to $90,000 to build the columbarium, plus landscaping materials and concrete that parks department employees will pour into a foundation and sidewalk surrounding the columbarium.
The new burial option will also increase the profit potential of that section of the cemetery exponentially, Orner said.
The land has room for 774 burial sites with a revenue potential of $620,000 at current prices. But 42 plots will be taken up to build several columbariums with an expected total of about 800 niches, Orner said. With a single niche cost of about $2,2000 and a double niche cost of $3,500, there is a revenue potential of over $2.5 million.
Each columbarium will have 40 single niches and 80 double niches, city documents show. Thinking in terms of just one columbarium, the $376,000 the cemetery would make from it could pay for several years of the cemetery’s annual budget, Orner said.
“The revenue that we can produce off of one of these would help pay for the cemetery’s operation,” Orner said. “And the more that we can (make) in revenue, the less we have to (take) with taxpayer money.”
A series of columbariums are planned to be built over time, with each previous columbarium raking in more than enough money to pay for the next, Orner said.
Repairing stones
The remaining $25,000 the council approved will fund an initial investment in resetting and repairing gravestones. There are many in the cemetery that are sinking into the ground, have broken apart, have toppled over, or are leaning on their foundation.
The repairs will start in the military section of the cemetery and go as far as the funds carry it. The plan is to repair some of the oldest stones in the cemetery from the 1800s and early 1900s, which belong to people who are long dead with no relatives left to repair their stones, Orner said.
“That’s part of our mission is, if we’re going to have a cemetery, we’re going to maintain it,” Orner said. “I think part of our mission we have to maintain it includes some of these stones that don’t have anybody to maintain them anymore.”
The $25,000 appropriation is likely not enough to right all of the gravestones, but it is a start. An estimate given for the work is about $35-$50 per gravestone, he said.
Before asking the council for money to complete the repairs, Orner applied for grant funding twice unsuccessfully.
