We had a fabulous time on Thursday with our first stone cleaning day! We all met at 9 and started with a little "stone cleaning lesson" from Dianne Leary with VOCA. We then set out to get dirty.
We decided to start in the back and work our way forward. The day was sunny but not super hot and we figured if it got too warm, we could move up under the trees. It ended up being a perfect weather day. Here are a few samples of the "before" images:
Pat, Amanda, and Sarah tackled the back rows, where the French Canadians are buried. You can see how incredible the stones look now, after some love, D/2, and a lot of elbow grease, that's the picture at the top of this post. Pat worked hard on the tall stone for Catharine Beach and it's amazing because it looks almost brand new. The D/2 will continue working and it will probably look even better in a couple weeks, believe it or not!
Donna had some help from a friendly cat while digging out Rebecca Ayers' stone so she could read the dates on the bottom. She (Donna, not the cat!) did a great job cleaning up several small stones that were hard to read, including the stone for Jonathan Ayers, who was in Co. F, 5th VT Volunteers in the Civil War.
Dianne found one super tricky stone, it has "chunks" on it, almost like little pieces of gravel, that made it really tough to clean and hard to read. We have a transcription from the 1914 survey that was done and while the bottom part was not transcribed, the main body of it is very touching and sad.
In memory of
Tryphena, wife of
Justin Hobart,
who died May 26
1825
in the 22nd year of her
age.
Also a Son lying upon her
arm aged 9 days.
After a cleaning, it's already greatly improved and much more legible. We're hoping that once the D/2 works some more magic, maybe we can figure out the rest. It's a beautiful stone with a lot of detail.
Anna is interning at the Bixby and we're hoping she might find some more info about the cemetery while she's researching General Samuel Strong. (who, as you probably know, is buried in the upper part of this cemetery)
We ended the day with sandwiches graciously donated by Community Market and chatted for a while. It was starting to get warm but the bugs pretty much left us alone and the sun was so nice after a week of rain. We ended up cleaning about 24 stones - not too shabby for brand new recruits and only about 3 hours worth of work!
Our next cleaning day will be on Sunday, July 16, from 8:30-12:30. We'll plan on having lunch available as well. If you'd like to help out, please RSVP here.
We will probably set up another cleaning day in August and maybe even one in September, if the weather is good. We're confirmed for stone repairs with VOCA on May 18, 2024. We could use as many people as possible for that, there is a lot of work to do, please be sure to share with your friends and family!
A very special thank you to the team: Dianne, Anna, Sarah, Amanda, Donna, and Pat. To those who planned to be here but couldn't make it - you were there in spirit and we hope to see you next time! This is going to be an ongoing project for at least the next couple years. As Pat said, "It will be wonderful to walk through this old cemetery and be able to see more clearly who is venerated here."
-Heather
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