Goat herd visit advances Lone Pine cemetery project

In a lonely stand of pine trees beside a wheat field west of Tekoa, lie the graves of a people from a time long ago.

No sign marks this cemetery, but some of the tombstones have been cleared and scrubbed clean. Many are now readable.

Over the past 10 years, a group of descendants of the people buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery have been gathering to clean up the cemetery as a way of paying tribute to the finished lives that made theirs possible.

Most of the 60 graves on the hill are people who settled in the area as homesteaders in the late 1800s. The earliest birth date on a gravestone is 1809...