ISHPEMING, Mich. (WZMQ) – On a breezy fall Saturday, dozens of NMU students and staff traded the classroom for a cemetery.
As part of a week of events celebrating the investiture of Northern Michigan University President Dr. Chris Olsen, volunteers gathered at the Ishpeming Cemetery to clean the graves of Civil War veterans. Around thirty to forty students and staff took part in scrubbing and restoring headstones, preserving a piece of local history that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Event organizer Jeff Korpi says the day was about more than just clean headstones. “Dr. Olsen is a historian and we thought it’d be pretty fitting to do a Civil War era tombstone cleanup today,” says Korpi. “We had about 30 to 40 students and staff out here today hoping to clean various headstones and certainly honor our past and rich history.”
Dr. Olsen’s formal investiture ceremony takes place Friday, October 2nd at the Northern Center. The public is welcome to attend.
