By Marianne Lincoln

On a cool, but sunny Saturday in June, a crowd of about 25 people showed up by 9 a.m. to learn from a Washington State Historical Marker Preservationist Mick Hersey, how to clean and level headstones at the Roy Cemetery. The cemetery is privately owned and recently changed hands. After the passing of Ed Zenker, his beneficiaries left Beth King in charge of the site and she and a group of local citizens have been working to keep it mowed, clean headstones, level and repair monuments, bases, organize and train volunteers.

A group of men from E Clampus Vitus, Doc Maynard Chapter based in the town of Rainier, WA, showed up all in their red shirts and were extremely helpful with the heavy lifting work.

As Mr. Hersey began, he talked about tools and materials. He also spoke about permissions. Even your own family member headstone technically belong to the cemetery. If you are going to clean them, you need to get the approval of the cemetery owner first.

First, he demonstrated wetting the stone with water. It helps prepare the surface. Then, applying a headstone cleaning solution, which he recommended has approvals even for the National Cemetery, called D2. It is necessary to mail order it, it is not available in stores on the West Coast. D2 is fairly safe to use, but in case you are curious, this is the government information on it:

D/2 Material Safety Data Sheet

They sprayed the D2 on the wet stone, and then began to scrub. For the inset lettering, there were wood skewers to pick out the moss. D2 gets into the stone and killa the growing moss and fungus. It continues to work for weeks, so after photos are best a couple weeks after application.

The soil in the Roy Cemetery is loam and it is soft. Many of the older headstones have sunken and tilted. On site, there was already a small pile of gravel to use as ballast under the stones to set them upright. Do not use pea gravel, it must be coarse material that will not shift. They dug around a stone, right down to the base to demonstrate. Smaller ones you can use a large pry bar, but on larger stones, pulleys and an A frame were necessary. Once the stone was raised, volunteer fille underneath with the gravel and soil until the stone was again at ground level. When the obelisk was placed back on top, a special epoxy putty was used that is stronger than cement.

Some markers were found to be too deteriorated or broken. Those are being taken for repair with a business that makes monuments. Across the cemetery, an old headstone was found buried more than a foot underground. The crew descended on the site to dig out the pieces.

The day lasted from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but was interesting, informative, and the volunteers did a lot of work. The trainees are continuing to work on the headstones, locating them underground, setting up GPS coordinates for their locations, and cleaning. Beth King is the cemetery coordinator in case you are interested in volunteering. They have a Roy Cemetery site on Facebook where you can follow their progress.