Planning is underway for the 13th annual Rio del Sol Kiwanis Club’s Dining with the Dead on Sept. 12 at Greenlawn Cemetary.
Organized by the Rio del Sol Kiwanis Club, the annual event features a barbecue dinner and a guided tour of Greenlawn Cemetery, where actors dress in 1800s attire to recount true stories of San Juan County’s earliest pioneers.
The production raises funds for the Kiwanis Club’s Clothes for Kids project and brought in $10,000 last year.
Longtime Farmington residents Paul and Jill McQueary brought the event to Farmington.
The couple winters in Yuma, Arizona, where Jill came across a cemetery tour concept. She and Paul saw an opportunity to combine their interest in history with their fundraising work. Jill returned to Farmington and brought the Dining with the Dead concept to the newly formed Rio del Sol Kiwanis Club.
“We were just starting a new Kiwanis Club,” Jill said. “So we came back, we talked to the club and said, ‘Do you guys want to do this?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’”
Dining with the Dead accommodates 350 guests and requires many hands on deck, about 40 volunteers, Jill said.
She and Paul initially handled organizing the even, but as it grew they brought in more help. Last year, Nikki Taylor stepped in to oversee the event’s operations.
Taylor first joined the production as a volunteer guide because she wanted to see the show, and tickets always sold out before she could buy them.
“I really love this show, and I love the cause because it raises so much money for our Clothes for Kids project,” Taylor said.
With Taylor managing the logistics, Jill focused on historical research. She works with a committee and scriptwriters to select up to 11 pioneers featured each year. The writing team includes Joan Monninger and Patty Tharp from the local Historical Society, and Debbie Braff.
The selection process can be challenging because not everyone buried at Greenlawn has enough documented history to develop into a story for the production, Jill said.
“I thought it’d be easy,” she said. “You walk through the cemetery, you see headstones and go, ‘Oh, we’ll do that one’. But you have to do somebody that has a story. There’s a lot of people buried there, but there’s no story.”
For those selected, the team dives into the research, often talking to surviving relatives and reading through old diaries to gather the facts.
“To me, that’s what makes it. It’s a historical reenactment. And to do a historical reenactment, it has to be true,” Jill McQueary said.
Taylor said the overall event helps her connect with Farmington’s history.
“Every year there’s certain characters that I just really bond to,” she said. “And learning about the downtown and why the streets are the way they are and what used to be in this building, it’s kind of stuck with me.”
The volunteers and actors expressed that the entire experience is very rewarding.
“I love doing it every single year. There’s never a time that I’ve never not wanted to do it,” said Jean Bougeant, who has participated in the event for eight years and portrays Peter Knickerbocker this year.
He has portrayed a variety of characters over the years. One of his most memorable roles was Bill Scott, the “running homer of La Plata.” He got so into the character – even going without shoes – that security nearly prevented him from entering the cemetery.
“I did my part a little too well that year because the guards almost didn’t let me in the cemetery because they actually thought I was a vagabond trying to get free food,” Bougeant said.
Stephen Fishman, who plays an 1890s photographer named Chester Odom, portrays the event’s only fictitious character. Fishman uses a fully operational 1895 camera to demonstrate historical photography for guests.
“We went to Dining with the Dead as guests last year,” Fishman said. “We said we’d love to be a part of it because we do Victorian costume cosplay in other places for other reasons. So we already have our costumes.”
In addition to the Sept. 12 event, about 150 fifth graders from Ladera and McKinley elementary schools attend a dress rehearsal and receive a living history lesson.
“The teachers say they come back, and they talk about the history of our community in school,” Paul McQueary said. “Then they go home and tell their parents about it.”
The McQuearys, only expecting the event to last a few years, have watched it grow beyond their initial expectations.
“We thought, ‘Oh, this is a pretty cool idea’. We’ll probably be able to do this for two or three years,” Paul McQueary said. “We didn’t know it was going to be as good as it is.”
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