Crash pulverizes age-old gravestones at White’s Chapel
White’s Chapel Pastor Lee Parks fears an Aug. 22 crash at her Route 1 church may have caused irreparable damage.
“You can’t put a price tag on some of the damage,” she said. “There are still pieces of gravestones all over the cemetery.”
Some of the gravestones are more than 200 years old, and many were pulverized when a work truck crashed into the roadside cemetery after ramming another vehicle in the northbound lane.
Parks said she and her husband had just returned from a two-week vacation and were settling in at the parsonage next to the chapel when she heard the crash.
“It started getting louder and louder. I jumped off the couch and got to the wall because I thought the truck was coming in,” she said.
Delaware State Police said a Milford man, 18, was driving a truck about 9 p.m. when it rear-ended a Honda before catapulting into the White’s Chapel graveyard where it struck several gravestones, said Sr. Cpl. Leonard DeMalto of the Delaware State Police.
Parks said the loudest crashes that night were gravestones flying 700 feet onto her front porch. The truck continued until it hit a utility pole and tree in front of the parsonage.
When it was done, Parks said the area looked like a war zone. “All you could see was dirt and debris everywhere,” she said.
The truck also destroyed the church’s brick sign, and the ramp of the church was taken out by a flying gravestone, Parks said.
The driver fled the scene, but was later found and cited with careless driving, driving without a valid license, leaving the scene of a property damage collision, failure to report a collision, and failure to provide information at the collision scene, DeMalto said.
Neither the driver or passenger of the Honda, both of Philadelphia, were injured, he said.
With no power or internet, Parks said, the utility companies worked tirelessly to bring them back online, and an area towing company helped clear out truck debris.
“Out of all this disaster, there were some incredibly helpful people who came out,” Parks said. “We’re incredibly grateful that nobody died.”
But trying to track down families whose ancestors’ gravestones were destroyed may prove difficult.
The chapel’s cemetery committee is working to contact families connected to the gravestones and monuments that were destroyed in the crash.
“The cemetery committee is hoping that the public can help them in getting things back to as close as possible to how the cemetery was prior to the accident,” Parks said.
Anyone with information on those buried at White’s Chapel is asked to call Ralph Davis, committee president, at 302-858-3395.
