Vandals destroy flower display at Uniontown’s Marshall park
After a summer filled with rain, the annual flowers at the Marshall Memorial Park in Uniontown had never looked better in the 20 years since the Green Gardeners group began planting them, the group’s president said.
The floral display came to a premature end overnight Saturday night or Sunday morning, as someone vandalized the site, pulling out hundreds of flowers and leaving the debris.
“It’s tragic,” said Lynda Waggoner, president of the Uniontown community group. “…They were extraordinary, and it’s a critical welcoming point into Uniontown. It just breaks your heart that somebody would do something like that, obviously without thinking of what they were doing. I can’t think any sane person would do something like this.”
A member of the group saw the destruction while driving by the park Sunday morning, Waggoner said. Another saw a video posted on Facebook taken by someone driving past the park overnight, showing a person kicking over the flowers.
Pennsylvania State Police, which handles overnight coverage in Uniontown, is investigating, Trooper Kalee Barnhart said Monday.
The volunteer group has been behind many beautification projects in the city, planting trees and adding flower pots downtown, and starting up the city’s first recycling program, Waggoner said.
When the Marshall Memorial Park was launched, the group took on a new project.
Members plant hundreds of flowers at the site every year. In keeping with America’s 250th anniversary, this year’s were red, white and blue, Waggoner said.
Some of the group’s roughly 20 members will go out to the park weekly to water the flowers, Waggoner said.
“We’re not a young club, so we’re all out there working really hard to make this nice for the community, and we hear good things,” Waggoner said. “I think people appreciate it, but to have this done is a slap in the face to the community.”
Uniontown Mayor Bill Gerke called the incident “disheartening.”
“The Green Gardeners make our city look nice, and then someone takes it upon themselves to destroy that,” he said. “It hurts, but we’ll just keep going along. And fortunately, we had some community members help clean up the mess.”
With winter coming, the group is removing the remaining plants for this year, “even though they were still looking good,” Waggoner said. But they plan to be back next spring.
“Every year it’s a challenge to raise enough money to replant,” she said. “But we’re determined to do it next year.”