T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Former Riverside Cemetery General Manager Dorie Tammen, pictured, retired this week after serving in her position since 2014. She will be assuming a new part-time role with the Historical Society of Marshall County.

When Dorie Tammen assumed duties as general manager of Riverside Cemetery in October 2014, she hoped to have the opportunity to delve into its past. What followed were years of article writing, research and being interviewed, making the cemetery internationally known and Tammen a trusted historian. While she officially retired from her position Friday, she says her passion for Marshalltown history will not diminish.

On May 16, she will begin a part-time role as museum/library assistant for the Historical Society of Marshall County working out of the Mowry Irvine Mansion.

“It just felt meant to be. It was fate. I think it will interest me and I can be helpful,” she said of the new opportunity.

Cemetery board trustee David Shearer has been named as Tammen’s successor, and she has spent her remaining time on the job training him.

Tammen said it was her late friend Jay Carollo who’d encouraged her to apply for the general manager job.

“I’d worked in healthcare my entire life. I lived in Belle Plaine for 26 years before I moved back to Marshalltown late in 2012. I worked for REM Iowa as program director for two years, starting up their services, before starting at Riverside,” she recalled.

While familiar with the cemetery, she knew nothing about the running of its office before accepting the position.

“I had a lot to learn,” she said.

After getting the hang of the day-to-day operations, she began digging around in records and paging through aged books. Carollo and other volunteers doing their own research would often bend Tammen’s ear, igniting her own spark for probing the past. Eager to share her findings, she took to social media and also collaborated with the Times-Republican on countless articles. In October 2016, she wrote her first column for the “Past Times” monthly supplement of the T-R and continued to do so until this month.

“The Riverside Facebook page was pretty inactive (when I became general manager). It had 45 followers,” she said.

Now, 5,000 followers later, Tammen fills the page with stories of tragedy, intrigue and love.

“I just think it opened up people’s eyes to what we have at Riverside. I don’t think the community at large knew a lot about the history,” she added.

Volunteers, ranging from retired folks to school children, have donated their time cleaning the grounds and scrubbing lichen-stained headstones. Some have even helped digitize records and lift sunken stones. Over the course of several years, Jerry McCann has worked to secure more than 50 headstones for unmarked graves, including those belonging to Civil War veterans. Tammen said Linda Pierce offered up her research skills to provide supplementary information for “Past Times” articles and social media posts.

The government, through providing paperwork to Veterans Affairs, paid for these grave markers. But in some cases, private donors have come through. Notably, an anonymous T-R reader paid to have a stone erected for Josiah French in late 2016. French was a formerly enslaved man who served in the military during the Mexican-American War and Civil War.

Putting Riverside on the map

For generations, Riverside has been a popular place to stroll the grounds and feed the waterfowl that call Lake Woodmere home. These birds are not only popular personalities with locals, but their tales have criss-crossed the globe. Most recently, Tammen was interviewed for “On the Road With Steve Hartman” (which aired on “The CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell”), about her quest to find a mate for lovelorn goose Blossom, who was mourning the loss of Bud.

“I’m a longtime fan of the show,” she noted. “My favorite story is about a little girl in Maine whose duckling follows her everywhere.”

Tammen contacted the show’s producers, and in a matter of days, was coordinating a time for Hartman to visit Riverside and chat with her.

Since then, Blossom and new beau Frankie have waddled off into the sunset, completely obvious to the attention their story has received from news outlets in Canada, South America, Australia, Norway and other places.

Managing a cemetery, she says, is not without its challenges. The August 2020 derecho resulted in damage to the grounds, the loss of trees and harm to many aged headstones. FEMA aid was denied because perpetual care cemeteries aren’t eligible.

Riverside received some grants from private agencies but no funding from the City of Marshalltown. The cemetery’s insurance cannot cover the cost to replace or repair headstones because those are the property of the lot owners — people, who in some cases, have been dead for more than 100 years.

“We’ve paid off over $430,000 in storm recovery, entirely from donations. That’s amazing from a community where so many people had damage, themselves,” Tammen said of the assistance.

A look back at favorite stories

The narratives Tammen found most intriguing during her time as general manager have included stories of Spanish influenza victims buried at Riverside, plus those who perished in railroad accidents or drowned in the Iowa River.

She has a particular affinity for author/historian Nettie Sanford Chapin; Civil War hero and Marshalltown Mayor Nelson Ames; Andrew Stenhouse, Marshalltown’s murdered bootlegger; World War I pilot Charles Peckham; Dr. Elizabeth Cook Speers-Gillette, one of Marshalltown’s first female physicians; Leona Wells, the first female U.S. senate staffer in charge of a high-powered Senate committee, and the highest paid woman in the U.S. government in the early 1900s; the suicide of photographer William C. Wallace, who took poison and died on the grave of prominent citizen Maymie Binford.

Tammen said what she’ll miss most about her post at Riverside is interacting with people who came in to research genealogy and hunting through old burial orders.

“It’s fun to have people come in who are really interested in their family history and show them those records. It was really rewarding,” she said. “I will really miss all the old records. They just fascinate me — when you see burial orders written 150 years ago. In a way, this was my niche job. It was where I belonged.”