Here’s your opportunity to join in a moving patriotic local event like others across the United States this holiday season. Volunteers are needed for “Wreaths Across America” to be staged at Sulphur Springs City Cemetery and Mel Haven Cemetery on Saturday December 14, 2019. To honor the more than 600 veterans buried there, a live fir wreath with red bow will be placed on each soldier’s headstone and the name of the soldier spoken aloud. This event will take place at Arlington National Cemetery, at 1,700 other cemeteries across the nation at the same time, and this year, the Black Oak Cemetery in Hopkins County will also join in that number. Local sponsors are also needed for the remaining number of wreaths needed.
Mrs. Dena Loyd is the Location Co-ordinator for Hopkins County, and she organized the first local Wreaths Across America in 2018. Quite excited about this year’s event, Dena hopes that even more of the public will attend the brief outdoor ceremony as well as have the pleasure of placing wreaths. “All 700 headstones will be marked ahead of time, and following the ceremony, hands-on volunteers will be needed to go out into the cemetery and place a wreath upon a headstone as a tribute to each soldier. Anyone who is moved to help can do so, from individuals to families to members of organizations. Last year, some parents brought their children and helped them learn this way of caring for those who helped secure our freedoms as Americans”. If you have a group which would like to help, please contact Dena at 903-348-8174.
If you would like to be a wreath sponsor, the cost is only $15 each. And for each two wreaths ordered, a third wreath will be donated by the supplier. So, if you write a check for $30, three wreaths will arrive in the local order. As of November 13, only about 100 more wreaths are needed….76 more for the Sulphur Springs/Mel Haven Cemetery and 24 more wreaths are needed for the Black Oak Cemetery. You can contact Dena Loyd, or if you’d like to contact Loretta Scott who is co-ordinating the Black Oak event, her contact is 903-307-9000.
The wreaths are supplied by the Wreaths Across America organization and the local order of 700 wreaths will be delivered in Sulphur Springs by truck on the day before the event. In fact, trucking companies all across the nation volunteer to transport the boxes of wreaths to towns and cities for placement, and they do this at no charge. All the trucking companies as well as the drivers volunteer for this duty because they have a heart for Veterans. The massive nation-wide process works out to be amazingly simple and successful, because each person personally cares. How this came about is written in the November issue of Farmer’s Electric Co-op magazine, which explains how the 1992 Arlington Wreath Project has become Wreaths Across America, with 160,000 wreaths expected to be placed this holiday.
According to Loyd, “the wreaths are supplied by the Wreaths Across America organization and the local order of 700 wreaths will be delivered in Sulphur Springs by truck on the day before the event. In fact, trucking companies all across the nation volunteer to transport the boxes of wreaths to towns and cities for placement, and they do this at no charge. All the trucking companies as well as the drivers volunteer for this duty because they have a heart for Veterans. The massive nation-wide process works out to be amazingly simple and successful, because each person personally cares. How this came about is written in the November issue of Farmer’s Electric Co-op magazine, which explains it’s start as the Arlington Wreath Project and is now carried out by ‘kind strangers’ all over this nation”. Locally, Loyd adopted the project for Hopkins County first as a tribute to her son Chad who was killed by an IED in Iraq in 2006, and to all other military heroes of local families.
