Lake of the Ozarks woman looking to save Camden County cemetery from washing away

CLIMAX SPRINGS, Mo. (KY3) - A woman is looking to save a Camden County cemetery from washing away into a creek.

Jerusha White is writing a book and started doing research. She used to drive by where the White Woolery Cemetery sits.

“At that time, it was hard to identify because it was just a farm fence and a lot of weeds grown up around it. I stopped there, and then found a lot of my relatives in that cemetery, and then realized that there was a problem with erosion from Bollinger Creek,” said Jerusha White.

White discovered her great great grandfather, Moses Cannon White, owned the land.

“It was in the spring, several years ago, maybe three or four years ago, that Moses was washed away. His tombstone was in the creek, and that’s when I hired someone to bring that tombstone and a couple of others up out of the creek and reset them,” said White.

She needed help fixing the problem. She turned to one of the Camden County Commissioners, Don Williams.

“I just thought, you know, these, the people that are buried there, it’s an old cemetery, the people that are buried there, scratched out a living in these hills, 100 years before the Lake of the Ozarks was built,” said Williams.

Commissioner Williams received help to come up with a solution.

”We’re going to align the bank with rock and armor the bank, basically, and then build what they call weirs that stick out into the channel that kind of pushed the channel away from that bank,” said Williams.

Hoping it will be a permanent solution.

”We should have the Corps of Engineers permit back in just a week or two, so I’m hoping that work will start within two to three weeks,” said Williams.

White says this means a lot to her.

”I’ve done some work and put up a monument in front of that, put up a fence around the front of it just so it would look nicer,” said White.

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