Like a burst of hardy pollen carried on the wind, Carol Wilkerson landed in Clarks Summit eight springs ago. Before long, she was planting seeds of community spirit and volunteerism that will bloom for years to come.
“We loved living in the Scranton area,” Carol said in a phone interview Tuesday. She and Jim, her husband of 37 years, moved here in 2017 when he took a job as a teacher and program director at Penn State Scranton. Last week, they started a new chapter, moving to the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, where their daughter and son-in-law will soon make them grandparents.
Carol Wilkerson, a founder of Friends of Shady Lane Cemetery, recently moved to Kentucky. (SUBMITTED PHOTO)
When they arrived in Our Stiff Neck of the Woods, Jim, an Air Force veteran, was quickly consumed with work. Carol, a retired lawyer and high school English teacher, had a lot of time on her hands.
“I started looking around for things to do,” she said. Her search eventually connected Carol with Clarks Summit neighbor Louise Brennan, and, later, to me.
After a visit to her great-grandparents’ graves at the long-neglected Shady Lane Cemetery in South Abington Twp., Louise texted me: “What a disgusting disgrace.”
Not me. The cemetery. I had been writing about other forlorn local graveyards for a while, and Louise called my attention to Shady Lane. I agreed that the cemetery had been left for dead, but what to do about it?
A week later, Carol and Louise invited me to meet them at Shady Lane. Their plan was to organize a community cleanup. Public response was so overwhelming that the two moved to make the cleanups a regular thing. What began with two retirees and a pair of shovels grew into Friends of Shady Lane, a registered nonprofit that resurrected the cemetery and created a volunteer network to ensure the 100-year-old community asset is never left for dead again.
“Louise got me into it,” Carol said Tuesday. “She likes to keep her hands busy. I like to keep my head busy, because I’m not as fit as she is. So the two of us together made a great team to get it going and now, man, it’s running strong.”
Friends of Shady Lane has a robust Facebook page, has hosted several successful fundraisers and community events and reclaimed the graves of soldiers, notable locals and infants. Volunteers have transformed a forlorn graveyard into a community gem and provided a framework adopted by similar community groups throughout the area.
With Carol’s guidance, Bill Davis and his small army of volunteers registered Friends of Abington Hills Cemetery as a nonprofit. Like its sister cemetery, the sprawling property off the Morgan Highway in South Abington Twp. has a board of directors to guide its reclamation and future maintenance. A similar grassroots group is cleaning up Washburn Street Cemetery in West Scranton.
The seeds Carol and Louise planted at Shady Lane are blooming far and wide, living proof that when neighbors pull together and take the initiative to improve their communities, their examples are infectious.
“I think a lot of people who have lived all their lives in the Scranton area tend to think, ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Carol said. “You know, ‘It’s always been this way, it’s always going to be this way.’
“That’s why it’s so important to attract new people to the area, people who come from a different background and may have fresh ideas and a fresh take on it who don’t accept ‘It’s always been this way, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Don’t accept that. Just go and do it.”
Carol did, and she left this community with a can-do legacy of community organization to be celebrated and carried on. She will be missed, and she will miss Northeast Pennsylvania.
“People who’ve lived there all their lives sometimes fail to appreciate how incredibly beautiful it is, and that is something we are going to miss,” she said. “We loved the mountains, and most of the people that we met were lovely.
“I was so encouraged by how many people came together to help with our cemetery effort. That shows you the good hearts of the people. When you ask for help, people there come together. They show up.”
Chris Kelly (TIMES-TRIBUNE FILE)
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, thanks Carol Wilkerson for leaving a beautiful, indelible mark on our community. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook.