VAN BUREN TWP. — Headstones of various sizes were recently toppled in the Becks Grove Road cemetery in an act of vandalism.

Vicki Payne, Van Buren Township trustee, and Valerie Edmunds, a member of Brown County Cemetery Preservation Society, both received calls on July 10 from family members of people buried in the cemetery.

Sixteen headstones had been knocked off their foundations, and a footstone had even been pulled off of its base and thrown into a yucca plant.

While some of them were small enough to lift and place back into their original positions, several are quite large and will require equipment to be replaced, Edmunds said.

None were broken or cracked, but some designs at the top of the stones are missing and have not been recovered, Payne said.

Edmunds said that cans were also found in the cemetery, so they assumed there was some sort of gathering or party. “I talked to some of the neighbors and nobody had heard anything,” Payne said. “It’s off by itself.”

Photos were turned in to the Brown County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.

Township trustees are responsible for maintaining the cemeteries in each of their townships, but they have help from volunteers. The Brown County Cemetery Preservation Society works throughout the county, cleaning and resetting headstones and ensuring that resting grounds are well maintained. The society began in 2015.

Society members also are working to discover more cemeteries of which they may not be aware. “We’ve been told they exist,” Edmunds said, “but we can’t find anyone to take us to them. Our mission since the beginning was to locate all the cemeteries and assess whether or not they need help.”

At Becks Grove, the toppled headstones will need old adhesive scraped off and new epoxy and mortar adhered to their foundations. There are some stones in the cemetery with tilted foundations that need to be completely removed so that more gravel can be added to the base of the foundation to straighten them out before they are replaced.

“It’ll take a while to get done,” Edmunds said. “We’re volunteers and we’re older. We’re kind of limited to what we can do.”

Society members donate their time and Edmunds said monetary donations are always welcome. They’re always looking for new volunteers, too, she said.

“The thing is, we go out and do all this work and when somebody comes along and vandalizes some of them, now we’re going to have to work for as long as it takes,” she said.

The culprits vandalized the resting grounds of those who “didn’t do anything to them,” Payne said. Some of the stones belonged to children.

“It’s very sad and disturbing,” she said. “If you’re going to be mischievous … that was not the place to go. Those people didn’t harm you.”

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