How do I contact the Fairbury Cemetery Association?

The Cemetery office phone number is (402) 729-3263. You are also welcome to send inquiries via email at admin@fairburycemetery.org. Our dedicated board members are also willing to take questions and comments most any time at their respective places of business. Our regular board meetings, generally held on the last Friday of every month, are open to the public. The association's mailing address is P.O. Box 408, Fairbury, NE 68352.

Why doesn't the cemetery allow the decoration of grave markers?

This is one of the most frequent questions we get. Although a short-term allowance is made for flowers, flags, and similar tokens of remembrance during observed holidays such as Memorial Day, the Fairbury Cemetery Association prohibits the use of decorations on grave markers that are not a permanent part of monuments or their foundations. The safety of our groundskeeping staff is the number one reason behind this rule. So many temporary decorative items can end up falling into the grass around markers, and these items can easily get overlooked, caught up in mowers and trimmers, and turned into dangerous projectiles. Furthermore, it compromises the efficiency of groundskeepers' work if they are constantly having to contend with obstructions such as trellises or statuettes or pinwheels or the like while keeping the cemetery groomed. Another reason for the prohibition of decorations comes down to consideration of general standards of aesthetics. You can decorate the inside of your home any way you like, and nobody else can say otherwise because it's your own, private space. In most cities and towns, however, local ordinances and neighborhood covenants limit how you present the exterior of your home to the rest of the community because the shared community's sense of identity must as a practical matter be regarded as primary to individual tastes. A cemetery is also a community. Since not everybody's sense of style is compatible with everybody else's, the Fairbury Cemetery Association board have no choice but to use their best judgment as arbiters of what is generally agreeable. This usually means ruling on the side of caution and establishing strict limitations on decorations (which can go for permanent decorative features of markers as well as temporary decorative items, by the way). Please understand that if the association's position seems strict, it is so only because we have to think about what is fair to the most people and to the cemetery on the whole.