The Howard County
I N
F O C U S
VOL.15, NO.10
F O R
P E O P L E
O V E R
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Caretaker protects the past
5 0 OCTOBER 2025
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY EDWARD WARNER
By Edward Warner It’s often said that Amercians fear death: We rarely talk about it, and sometimes, we even abandon family burial sites, leaving them untended and unprotected. David Zinner, 75, of Columbia, is fighting that trend — and succeeding. He wants people to know that, as he put it in a recent interview with the Beacon, “talking about death won’t kill ya.” This fall, Maryland’s abandoned cemeteries will get a boost. A new piece of legislation that aims to revitalize the state’s abandoned cemeteries goes into effect in October. Although volunteers will initially carry out the work, Zinner hopes the state will provide funding for them later. In December, a second piece of legislation Zinner and others helped pass will initiate what may be the state’s first census of its cemeteries. That census, Zinner hopes, will help prevent gravesites from being lost. Sometimes they’re lost due to poor recordkeeping; other times, developers will try to remove gravestones and build on the land.
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LEISURE & TRAVEL
Ancient civilizations and modern cities in Vietnam and Cambodia; plus, a writer returns to Paris after 60 years page 20
A 30-year advocacy
410-992-1241 vantagepointresidences.org Managed by
Columbia resident David Zinner founded a group five years ago that trains Maryland prisoners to clean up cemeteries. Zinner, who also formed an organization to spread the word about “green burials,” helped pass recent legislation to catalog and protect the state’s historic cemeteries. He is also an avid biker.
he helped organize food cooperatives. He’s been active in organizing ever since. More recently, in 2020 Zinner co-founded a group called the Preser vation and Rehabilitation Initiative for Neglected Cemetery Entities, or PRINCE. It teaches the Maryland prison population how to do cleanups, cut trees and remove invasive species in cemeteries.
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Zinner began fighting for cemeteries in the early 1990s, when he and others stepped up to save an Ellicott City cemetery from becoming the site of new houses. It wasn’t easy. The developer breaking ground on the site of St. Mary’s Cemetery had struck human bones before the county listened to opponents like Zinner and offered the developer a different parcel of land. “I got into death accidentally,” he joked, “and it was at the time a really small pond. You never saw articles in the New York Times or Washington Post about death.” Zinner started his career decades ago as a community organizer in Chicago, where
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Zinner said the group was “designed with three ideas in mind: To get prisoners into the fresh air, to do something that was meaningful and to give them some skills so they could find jobs” when released. So far, PRINCE has helped rehabilitate about 10 cemeteries. In 2013, it cleaned up
ARTS & STYLE
Boogie the night away at Saturday Night Fever at Toby’s; plus, read three new nonfiction books this fall page 26
See ZINNER, page 28
FITNESS & HEALTH k Stay sharp with exercise k Healthiest snacks
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LAW & MONEY k Social Security myths k Medicare Advantage pitfalls
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