BUFFALO, N.Y. — We are celebrating WNY by recognizing a group of volunteers who are literally getting their hands dirty to dig up the past.
The Friends of Concordia have been hard at work paying homage to the every day people who built this community. The group has been hard at work restoring a long-forgotten Buffalo cemetery, because, as their motto says "every stone tells a story."
Concordia was formed in 1859, it is one of the oldest cemeteries in Buffalo.
It's one of only 4 cemeteries from that time period that still remain. It is a piece of Buffalo history dates back to our community's earliest days.
26 years after the Village of Buffalo was incorporated and a year before the Queen City grew into the nation's busiest rail center, these graves mark the final resting place for Buffalo's pioneers.
Bonnie Fleischauer of the Concordia Foundation says "we uncovered two stones that were in French that have dates from before the cemetery was open. So they had to be moved here, but we have no record of that."
Part of the mystery exists because the cemetery was abandoned in 2001.
In 2003 a group of volunteers came together to resurrect Concordia.
They cut grass, cleared brush and looked for the lost, a process that continues today.
Fleischauer explains "we are doing a dig. we are going to locate, using the ground penetrating radar and dowsing (a method of using special rods to detect objects underground), we're locating stones and then we are safely bringing them up. We document them and take pictures. If a stone is too damaged we record it and rebury it to preserve it."
For volunteers, like Nina Fedak, it is a matter of not just uncovering history.
"It's kind of like you're finding the past. You're finding somebody who hasn't been thought of in a hundred years."
Donna Bonning says it's a matter of bringing back the past and the people who created it.
"Their relatives are gone. you know, everybody's gone who would have come to the cemetery to visit the gave." And Chris Cavarello adds "it's part of our history. If you live in Buffalo and have been here for a long time, these people made up our community."
If you would like to get involved, or simply get more information about Historic Concordia, or any other of Buffalo's vanished cemeteries, the Concordia Foundation will be holding an event to discuss the history and how it relates to the future Saturday, September 28 at noon at Concordia Cemetery, on 438 Walden Avenue.