Spring Valley working on plan for donated memorials in public places

The kind of love Heather Hammitt feels for her late mother is one of the most beautiful things in the world, and she wants that love to be a visible feature that will further beautify her hometown of Spring Valley.

Hammitt recently sent a request to the Spring Valley Park Board to have placed in a public area a memorial she’s bought to honor her mother, Joan McCook Hammitt, a Spring Valley native, a 1971 graduate of Hall High School and longtime community volunteer who died from cancer on May 30 of this year.

The request caught the board and the City Council by surprise as there is no policy or program in place for putting private memorials on public property. While the sentiment at Monday’s City Council meeting was the council would be happy to approve the request, the council would prefer to have a policy in place before doing so.

So now, those civic leaders are working to create that program, one that will govern such gestures and make sure they are not only properly located in a public area, but also are appropriate, tasteful and present a positive image of the city, as the Hammitt memorial would.

“I’ve reached out to several neighboring municipalities to see if they had guidelines for something like this, anything to give us a baseline for starting something like this,” Fourth Ward Alderman and Park Board leader Dave Pellegrini said. “I guess I envision a few things, some parameters like the cost of the project, the content and of course the location. We’ll probably designate space in a couple parks, maybe even all the parks.

I like the concept. It’s really a nice gesture and would be nice for our parks, but it needs structure and we’re really at ground zero right now.”

Hammitt, who not long ago also helped GROW Spring Valley reinstate the city’s memorial brick program and has bricks coming in her mother’s name, has decided on a bronze statue. It depicts a small girl pulling a wheelbarrow, with the latter part also serving as a planter for flowers to immortalize her mother’s renowned “green thumb.”

There also is a bench and a small plaque that they’d like to have with it, with the estimated $7,000 to $10,000 expense incurred by the family.

“People say the statue captures her spirit,” Hammitt said. “She was an avid gardener and when she was outside gardening, people would stop and tell her how amazing and how beautiful her flowers are. So when I started thinking about the memorial, I knew it had to have something to do with flowers and gardening, and I found the perfect thing.

“That you can plant live flowers in it is an amazing tribute. I may need some assistance putting those flowers in because I don’t know that I’ve inherited her green thumb, but we will see.”

Hammitt has spoken with Pellegrini about what’s happening, and Hammitt completely understands. In fact, she even welcomes the delay, if it will help others follow her lead.

“I’ve made it my mission to transform her terrible loss into a joyous legacy,” Hammitt said, “so I get it that they’d like to have some structure to give others a road map to follow. But if this delay helps to create a bigger program and inspires others to give back to the community and memorialize their loved ones, that’s even more amazing. That’s even better.”