GALLERY: A grand hill for sledding  

By DAVID LEE

HUDSON–A tour of the historic Cedar Park Cemetery was conducted on Sunday, October 20. Organized through the Hudson Area Library, the tour has been an annual event for the past six years. It was led by the library’s history room committee member and Spotty Dog Books and Ale proprietor Kelly Drahushuk who has done a lot of research into the histories of many of the luminaries resting in the cemetery’s ground. There were about 50 people up for the hike. History room coordinator Barbara Shufelt says that capacity for the event is always full.

The tour included the final resting places of some of Hudson’s first developers, the “proprietors” of the city. The tour visited the stones of artists such as Sanford Gifford and notables such as the Andrews sisters and their niece who survived the sinking of the Titanic.
The tour stopped at the Evans Crypt which holds the remains of her own distant and recent family, among them veterans and a former Hudson mayor and owner of Evans Ale brewery. As presented by Ms. Drahushuk, the grave markers and their documentation provided a wonderful sketch of the history of the city, and by extension, the country.
And the fact that much of the history was written by white men was not ignored by Ms. Drahushuk, the final two stones on the tour being those of poet Maggie Estep who died in 2014, and Robert Lee Jones, a high school kid who died under a pile of tacklers during a varsity football game.