PLYMOUTH, Maine — Clark Road Cemetery is one of the four Plymouth cemeteries that local volunteers are now working to restore.
For the past five weeks, a handful of community members have donated a few hours of their time to clean, scrape, scrub, piece together, and dig out tombstones.
The oldest tombstone at Clark Road Cemetery dates back to 1826, 195 years ago, and many of the headstones are broken, dirty, moldy or defected. So a group of community members and volunteers are going every Tuesday to clean the tombstones.
"Those groves are really deep and these stones have been unattended for years and years," said volunteer Joline Weeks. "It's been a group effort. Everybody has their little niche!"
So far, volunteers have cleaned nearly half of that cemetery and will start working on the other half next Tuesday.
"It's history; it's gotta be preserved, and these people who are buried here deserve it, they deserve to be remembered," said volunteer Ardis Holt.
As a way to honor and respect those who are buried there, Elias Monument was hired to fix the broken headstones and place them back where they belong.
Linda Seaver is one of the cemetery restoration organizers. She says it was very important to start with the veterans. There are three of them at the Clark Road Cemetery.
"Which is very important to us as a community because of those that have given their service for us to have the freedoms that we have today, we have a Civil War veteran, a Mexican War veteran, and a Revolutionary War veteran," said Seaver.
"I joined a group called Maine Old Cemetery Association and learned how to clean the stones through them," said Michelle Grey.
Grey started the effort by following family trees.
"I discovered that his third great grandparents are buried here," said Grey, referencing her husband's family and her findings. "We never knew!"
Grey started by cleaning her husband's family stones and encouraged community members to help her do the entire cemetery. Now, they are on a mission to do all four of the town cemeteries.
They are using a special cleaning solution called D-2, to clean and restore the headstones and footstones.
Grey says the D-2 is $62 a gallon and some of the other cleaning equipment was donated by community members. The town of Plymouth also gave some money to help with more professional restoration work.
"It feels good to make this place look nice!" said Zack Skidgel, a teen who is also volunteering to beautify the place.
"We use a soft plastic scraper to remove the dirt," said Seaver. "It is very time-consuming, it will probably take me at least an hour to get this stone to the proper showing."
"Yes, it might be a state rule, but this town has taken a proactive initiation of trying to do it themselves without the cost of hiring somebody to do it, and it has become personal, not only to them but to me as well even though my ancestors are not buried here," said volunteer Galen Dunton. "It's nice to be remembered!"
Lee Whitaker is in charge of making a map of the cemetery,
"We are finding that there are a lot of graves here that we didn't realize were here, which is a huge part of the mapping too, ok so these ones that we are finding....where do they belong?!" said Whitaker.
"There is a little bit of history in each corner of this cemetery, history of where we are, history of going forward, is history going to repeat itself?" said Seaver.
"We are finding families again that are lost," said Seaver.
"There are families here that lost children within a few days of each other. We think we have it hard today, but think about how they lived and losing both children in a matter of days," says Grey explaining some of her other findings.
Grey says their efforts are all worth it when people just drive by and say things like, "Wow, there are more white stones popping up!" She says it's good to hear that they are noticing.
Anyone can participate in the project. If you are interested, you can go to Clark Road Cemetery in Plymouth on Tuesdays at 9 a.m. until they finish that cemetery work and head on to the next one.
If you would like to donate money to help them with the supplies to clean the tombstones, you can send a check to the Plymouth Town Office.