Portage County roundup: Palmyra and Edinburg look to update fire/EMS, plus Rootstown, Deerfield, Charlestown and Paris news

Rootstown just finished installing two columbaria at Homeland Cemetery. Columbaria are structures for the reverential and usually public storage of funerary urns, holding cremated remains of the deceased. Each columbarium that was put in holds 80 urns.

“They’re on concrete slabs, and we stamped them and made them look real nice,” township Trustee Dave McIntyre said. “We’re going to put a bench out there, too. You’re not being buried in the ground but rather in this 4-foot-wide-by-6-foot-tall marble of granite thing. You could take the faceplate off and put the urn inside. We have 80 niches on each columbarium. This is something new to Rootstown, and we’re getting a lot of interest right now. It seems like a lot more people are getting cremated.”