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Date: 8/8/2023
WESTFIELD — Approximately 50 residents from Blandford, Russell, Monson, Wilbraham, Ware and Athol joined Veterans Graves Officer Gene Theroux at the Pine Hill Cemetery on Aug. 2 to learn about cleaning and repairing gravestones from conservator Jonathan Appell of Atlas Preservation in Connecticut. The event was a free workshop sponsored by the Westfield Veterans Services and Pine Hill.
Appell started by bringing the group around to various monuments, and talking about the various burial trends and styles, and the different types of stones and materials used. He said a gravestone can weigh 150 to 200 pounds a cubic foot.
Appell said beginning in 1785, a marble quarry opened in Dorset, Vermont, that started to be used for cemeteries.
“A lot of the marble is Vermont marble,” he said.
The stones used for the bases were less expensive regional material, such as Connecticut sandstone, whereas in other parts of the country, limestone was more regionally available.
Appell said granite was being quarried in the 1700s, but “they were not good at it.” He said as time went on, the process was refined, and cemeteries started using granite monuments, which were more durable.
He said the quarries with high-quality stone were few and far between.
One of the problems with the early marble stones was they snapped easily, and lost their finish, deteriorating with the acid rain in the Northeast.
A trend developed towards bigger monuments and family plots, with a large center monument. The multi-piece marble for the large monuments used pins made from molten lead and sulfur that would rust, forming sulphuric acid that would damage the stones from the inside.
Design movements in the cemeteries included Egyptian revival, which favored obelisks, and Greek revival, which favored urn and willow designs. He said the earlier Puritan gravestones were more basic, with messages like, “Watch out — you’re next.”
Appell said the Industrial Revolution impacted everything, and family plots with obelisks, benches and fences started to become popular. These started to be discouraged, and some fences have been removed, in order to be able maintain the cemetery plots.
Appell said by 1902, Sears Roebuck was selling monuments.
Theroux was present at the workshop with his staff of veterans on the tax-exempt program, who have been repairing gravestones in cemeteries around the city for the last several months.
Karen Sikes McTaggart from Russell Historical and Russell Cemetery Commission said she had been following Theroux’s work with the veterans on Facebook, and had been astonished to see a post of the gravestones of her great-great-grandparents, Curtis Barnes, who died in 1880, and Lucy Barnes, in 1883, who were from Granville. McTaggart said her family had been searching for their stones.
“That’s so cool! He would have had no idea this was my family,” McTaggart said to Mark Platt, one of the veterans who worked on the stones, who was originally from Russell.
Theroux said every day his team works he keeps a complete history of photos, labels and hours worked by all the veterans, and posts many of the photos on Facebook.
Theroux said at the end of the presentation by Appell, the participants in the workshop would be cleaning flats and putting up service flag holders.
Kali Fantakis, office manager for Pine Hill Cemetery, and cemetery volunteers set up a tent with refreshments and pizza for lunch for workshop participants.