Guy Sternberg, director of Starhill Forest Arboretum in rural Menard County (the largest research/collection center for the study of oak trees in the nation), is also the arborist for Oak Ridge Cemetery, home to the largest habitat for rare and hybrid oak trees in Illinois, if not the Midwest. Every October Guy recruits more than 40 volunteers to work the annual tree tour in the cemetery, where interpreters discuss all things “Quercus” (oak tree), and other species growing in the cemetery.
For the last five years, Stephanie Martin, director of the Sangamon Valley Collection (SVC) at Springfield’s public library, and I have volunteered our services at the annual tree tour to interpret a different site in the cemetery and do our best to be tree “experts” for a day. This year we were assigned to the “Garden of the Gospels” (Block 48), a unique suburb of Oak Ridge developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Designed to accommodate flat headstones and centered around a rectangular upright monument showcasing the “authors” of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – the garden is one of several themed landscapes in the “new” part of the cemetery. Despite an annoying and recurring grammatical error in the carved text on the monument, the Gospels garden is an attractive feature not far from the Veterans memorials.
Each apostle is carved life-size in granite, with a brief descriptive summary of their gospel message, along with a representative animal symbol (Matthew, winged angel; Mark, lion; Luke, ox; John, soaring eagle).
Originally called the “Garden of the Apostles,” the site was laid out in a circle with the monument in the center, with perhaps a dozen flowering crab trees surrounding the gravestones, the first of which appeared in the 1960s. All but two of the original trees have died and been removed, but the remaining two still had blossoms on them last month.
Stephanie did most of the hard research about the Garden’s creation, combing through old board minutes and newspaper files to understand how the site was managed and marketed and to whom. Curiously, the ring of the garden is filled with headstones but inside the circle is virtually empty.
Most of the interments were from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, with the most recent in 2024. There were headstones for military veterans from World War I, World War II and Korea, all eligible for Camp Butler National Cemetery burials, but nevertheless buried in Oak Ridge. Reverend Lele Clyde Hall (1892-1971) served in World War I as a private in Battery F, 48 Field Artillery, but came back to Sangamon County, where he worked for the Illinois Terminal Railroad and served for a time as chaplain for American Legion Post 32. Sometime in the 1960s he moved to Missouri but was later laid to rest in the Garden.
Airman First Class John A. Steele (1934-2021) proudly served in the Air Force in Korea and is also buried in Block 48. Steele was born in Beardstown and worked as a pressman for the State Journal-Register before retiring in 1996 after 36 years of service. Steele loved to play golf, named a local golf tournament for his son, Michael, (who predeceased him), and died during the COVID pandemic.
Just outside the perimeter of the Garden is the grave of Dr. Robert Allen Harp, a cardiovascular surgeon and former chair of Southern Illinois University’s Thoracic Surgery Department in Springfield. Harp (1929-1976), was an Air Force veteran who had worked at the Mayo Clinic before settling down in the capital city. During the 1960s, he performed the first open-heart surgery in Sangamon County. He and his wife, Rita Belle (nee Millard), had four children together – Rae Ellen, Rhonda Lee, Robert (Robby) and Richard (Ricky).
What struck me as I read Dr. Harp’s gravestone was that his birth date – Aug. 18 – was also the date he died. Curious. He was 47. Buried next to him were all four of his children, who died on the same day as Dr. Harp. Disturbing. If bells are ringing in your head, they were tolling in mine. Rita Belle, although buried in the same plot, did not share their fate.
In subsequent trips to the SVC’s newspaper archives, we learned that Dr. Harp and his children (ages 18, 16, 14 and 11) were killed near Durango, Colorado, when their twin-engine plane – piloted by Dr. Harp – crashed in “adverse weather” soon after takeoff. There were no survivors. Although foul play was ruled out, investigators at the scene reported that the plane did not ignite upon impact and there was no fuel in the lines. It had not been refueled.
It gets murkier. Dr. Harp’s obituary, printed in the Aug. 20, 1976, Springfield State Journal-Register, listed his aunt, Ms. Pauline Harp of Texas, and an unnamed cousin, as his only survivors. Was that a mistake or just another mystery to unravel? Further investigation revealed the Harps had divorced earlier that summer, and Rita Belle had remarried one week before the crash to a man named Andrew S. Marcy.
Marcy, who died in May 1982, was the owner of the A.S. Marcy Boat Company at Lake Springfield. He, too, is buried in the Harp family plot. On Marcy’s gravestone, Rita had the words “Mechanical Genius” and an image of a small cabin cruiser engraved.
As for Rita, she took her secrets to the grave.
So many fascinating and unwritten stories in our cemeteries. I hope you have a chance to visit the Harp family in Oak Ridge someday. They are at rest in the Garden of the Gospels, along with many others, whose stories are yet to be told.
William Furry of Petersburg is the executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society, a former editor at Illinois Times, and a longtime Springfield folk musician.
This article appears in Low attendance holds back school performance.
My family lived a couple miles away from the Harps on the lake. My dad, Dr. Phillip Haggerty, was friends with Dr. Harp, and our 2 families spent a lot of time together from the time we moved to Springfield in 1967 til the crash. Rhonda and I were white blonds, and when we were 8 or 9, for some reason she talked me into us vowing never to dye our hair, and to this day I’ve kept our promise. One time when we were swimming in the lake at the Harp’s house, a carp came up to Raye (who was in a bikini), and kissed her bellybutton, perhaps thinking it was another carp or something…We laughed til we cried! The suction even left a pink ring around her bellybutton for a while, haha! The 2 girls carpooled with my older sister Becky and me throughout high school at SHA. Raye drove a VW Bug which turned over one day and the back window busted out, so every morning in the winter before it got fixed, we’d put tons of blankets in the dryer to get them warm to take with us in the car for the ride to school. The snow would swirl around our faces, but we were comfy-warm! Rhonda said one day that she had a feeling that she wasn’t going to be around the next (her junior) year at school, and Raye got after her for being macabre. My sister Becky and Raye were to go off to SMU together in that same plane a week after the accident. Raye was working toward getting her pilot license and was copiloting with her dad when the plane crashed. I heard that one of the twin engines blew and sent the plane into a spin, but I didn’t know there was no gas in the engine, which makes me curious. The loss of the whole family was traumatic. Besides Raye and Rhonda, Robbie was becoming a serious young man, and little Ricky was so adorable and funny. Dr. Harp was one of the best cardiologists in the nation. The 5 casket funeral had a HUGE turnout, and a woman standing next to my mom at the burial said, “A lot of children are having to grow up today.”
–Lisa Haggerty Palmer, Knoxville, TN