Restoring beauty

The burly guy with a beard looks around the little graveyard at the end of a dead-end road in Jefferson Township, cold November rain falling on headstones and a carpet of fallen leaves.
And he says, “If we don’t start educating our youth about the importance of these things, we’re just spinning our wheels.”
John “Walt” Walters has seen it before: A remote rural cemetery desecrated in a random act of violence, headstones knocked over and smashed to bits.
But the damage at Finch Cemetery was extreme.
“It was flattened,” says Jefferson Township trustee Jerry Monroe.
In all, at least 78 headstones — of about 100 in all — were damaged early this year. Some were broken into five or more pieces, and the fragments were scattered all around the cemetery adjacent to the Jay County Conservation Club.
The first step, says Monroe, was picking up the chunks of stone, trying to pile together those that came from the same grave. With help from his brother-in-law, Ray Walter, and his father-in-law, Elwood Huntsman, Monroe tried to bring order to the chaos this spring.
Then he turned to the Jay County Cemetery Commission for help.
Monroe’s township budget had money set aside for mowing the cemetery, but not for repairing damage of this magnitude.
Headstone restoration and repair is part of the cemetery commission’s mission, says its chairman, Rex Pinkerton. So when Monroe asked for help, there was help available. The cost of the Finch Cemetery restoration work is likely to run in the neighborhood of $15,000, with the commission picking up the tab.
And there was guidance.
Pinkerton directed Monroe to Walters, who operates one of the few companies now involved in cemetery restoration in Indiana. A few years ago, there were several companies doing this sort of work. Today there are only a handful.
And there may not be another that takes its job as seriously as Graveyard Groomer, Walters’ restoration company based in Connersville.
Walters has been doing this sort of work for about 17 years, initially as an employee of Fayette County then operating his own business.
Earlier this year, he spearheaded the restoration work on the Jaqua Pioneer Cemetery in Portland that had been neglected for more than a century.
“I fell in love with all these old yards,” says Walters. “I’m a fortunate fellow.”
At Finch Cemetery, Walters and his two employees acted not only as restoration experts but as detectives, sorting out which pieces matched with which, whether stones were in the right place and how the graveyard was originally laid out.
Rather than just put together pieces and set them in the ground, they worked to figure how the rows of graves, the spacing between them and whether a grave had just a headstone or both a headstone and a footstone as was the custom at one time.
And while Walters and his crew worked, so did Monroe.
He created a large, detailed map of the cemetery, numbering each stone and gravesite. Then, because he knew that after the establishment of county health departments in 1882, all births, deaths and burial sites were recorded, he developed a list of those whose remains are interred at Finch Cemetery.
“It’s very time consuming,” he says.
Now, Monroe adds, he’d like to see a permanent monument or marker of some kind established at the entry to the cemetery, something that would include his numbered map and a corresponding alphabetical list of those buried there. He’s hoping to be able to partner with a local non-profit in order to seek donations or grant funding to make that happen.
Meanwhile, Walters and his crew are finished for the season. The mortar and glue don’t behave properly when the temperatures dip too low.
They’ll be back in the spring to complete their work, which includes cleaning the restored stones to their former gleaming condition.
But both Walters and Monroe know how fragile their efforts are in the face of vandalism.
“There’s no guarantee,” says Monroe. He’s been told there will be increased police surveillance of the site.
“We’d like to think that when they see it restored, it would deter them,” says Walters. “They’re still fragile stones.”
Some of Walters’ employees have urged having the cemetery adopted by a group of scouts.
But it all comes down to education and learning to appreciate what might be lost.
Walking through the stones, Walters points to one still missing the deceased’s name. What remains is a date: 1895. And an age: One year, six months. And an inscription: “Weep not father or mother for me. I am waiting in glory for thee.”
The burly guy with the beard reads the words and hangs onto his composure.
“This will be a beautiful little spot when completed,” he says.

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