Tombstone Detectives to offer unique tour of cemetery

Parents and children looking to get a better understanding of Marquette history will have a unique opportunity to do so Thursday.

The Marquette Regional History Museum will be conducting a tour at Park Cemetery in Marquette featuring the Tombstone Detectives, who are actors portraying the ghosts of prominent and interesting figures from Marquette’s past. The tour will feature a Civil War soldier reading letters he had written to his sister and the captain of an ore boat in the early 20th century.

Betsy Rutz, Museum Educator at the MRHC, said, “We’d hope that the kids can take away with them the idea that all of the people buried here have a story; they’re all interesting folks that lived in the area and so that they see the cemetery, which is a beautiful park, a beautiful place to walk and they can find interesting things to learn about here and there’s colorful characters behind all of those stones.”

After the tour, kids will have the chance to roam the cemetery solving little mysteries and conducting tombstone rubbings.

“We can teach children and families how to correctly get a rubbing off of a tombstone with crayons and paper,” Rutz said, “to do that respectfully, but you can come up with some beautiful rubbings to take home with you as a memory. We’ll show them how to clean a stone and what it is that you can find out about a stone, just those simple facts that are carved on it.”

The tour even features Will Adams, a character at the center of the MRHC’s play, Willpower, which debuts in September.

The tour begins at 1 p.m. Thursday and a $5 donation is recommended but not required.