CORNELIA – Resting on about five acres outside Demorest is the burial site of more than 150 U.S. Military veterans.
VFW Memorial Park is located at 1492 Smith Loop Road and is owned by Grant Reeves VFW Post 7720 in Cornelia.
The cemetery is about 50 years old and continues to serve as a resting place for Veteran of Foreign Wars members and their spouse, or VFW Auxiliary members.
“When I moved here in 2015, I learned that this post had a cemetery,” says Post 7720 Commander Bill Miles. “A year later when I became the post commander, they had said they thought they were the only VFW to have a cemetery. I went to my first national convention and I got with the national headquarters and they confirmed for me that we’re the only VFW in the United States to have our own cemetery. The best we can tell, the late ‘60s is when the property was purchased. The post members raised all the money for the monuments, the clearing of the land and built that cemetery, and we’ve been running it ever since.”
That money came through community fundraising, as well as sales from the restaurant formerly operated by the post.
“The information I got from the past commanders that have been through this post and past members is that when they started the restaurant and canteen here, those monies went to building the post up to what it is now and all the monuments you see out at our cemetery, the upkeep,” Miles says.
Miles, who is in his fourth year as post commander, trained more than 10,000 troops for deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004, 2005 and 2006, after serving there himself.
“I did two brigades plus 150 MIT teams, transitional teams, to go in,” Miles says. “The hardest part of that job wasn’t the long hours seven days a week non-stop, being away from my family after I’d already been in Iraq for 12 months myself in ’03-’04. It was the casualty in theater reports every day for the units we trained. We had KIAs [killed in actions], we had casualties. That was what was tough.”
While VFW Memorial Park doesn’t serve primarily as a burial place for those killed in action, it does give a final resting place to post members who served America.
Post 7720 Cemetery Chairman Bill McAllister says the cemetery is unique.
“The cemetery is designed just for the VFW,” McAllister says. “It’s for VFW members and their spouses, and if they have dependent kids that are under 18, they can also be buried there like if it’s a car accident or something like that.”
There is one way outside Post 7720 membership to be buried at VFW Memorial Park in Habersham County.
“We have one exception out there,” McAllister says. “If they’re killed in combat, whether they’re a member of the post or not, and they want to be buried out there, we have a special area up there by where the old gun is. A lot of people don’t know it, but that’s what that’s set aside for. Any veteran from Habersham County or the local area here that’s killed in combat and wants to be buried there, we’ll bury them there.”
Following the death of Post 7720 member Clifford Spry Jr., in 2016, Spry’s spouse donated a chain link fence to be placed around the cemetery, providing separation between it and a subdivision located adjacent to the top section. While Hurricane Irma took her best shot at the cemetery, damaging the fence in five sections, the fencing company provided a discounted rate to allow the nonprofit veterans’ organization to repair it, Miles says.
Other improvement projects also are in the works, including restoration of the lettering on the monument sign and the entry and exit gates.
“Now, the upcoming project this year is we’re going to be putting new metal letters out there on the front sign,” Miles says. “Currently, they’re black letters. We want to make it more patriotic so we’re going to go – since there’s three levels of wording – we’re going to change it to red, white and blue.”
Miles says prior to Memorial Day, two men put in community service hours at the cemetery, hand edging each memorial marker.
“There’s roughly 150-plus headstones up there right now,” Miles says. “When I say 150, that’s veterans but there’s the spouses also. We’ve got quite a few spouses up there. And we also have two children that I’m aware of. That’s one of the nice things about this thing is a post member and their spouse get a plot.”
Additionally, the bylaws for the post cemetery were changed three years ago to allow VFW Auxiliary members and their spouses to be buried there.
Miles says the post wants to update the cemetery’s decades-old entrance to make it more aesthetically pleasing to surviving family members and to the community.
“Like I said, we’re getting ready to do a cemetery project to redo the signs,” Miles says.
After that, Miles says the entry and exit gates need work.
“We’re waiting for the guy to come out to see what it’s going to cost to redo our gates,” Miles says. “They need to be powder coated. They’re the old paint. They’re faded and they just don’t look very good. We’re always trying to keep [the cemetery] up.”
Miles says the cemetery has been a very important aspect of Post 7720 since roughly the late 1960s.
“I would say if you look at anything this post does, the cemetery is No. 1 on our list,” Miles says. “If there’s something wrong, we’ll fix it. If we don’t have the money, we’ll try to find it and get it and fix it and make it right, because the cemetery is near and dear to all the members’ hearts and the Auxiliary.”
Anyone interested in supporting the VFW Memorial Cemetery or the post’s other projects can contact Post 7720 in Cornelia at (706) 778-4981.
Miles says calls will be answered whenever possible, and all messages left will receive return calls within 24 hours.
“Veterans of Foreign Wars, we’re like any other nonprofit organization, donations are always welcome, because it’s a business and it’s a struggle,” Miles says. “Our only income is our bingo on Thursday nights, and then what we get in donations.”
