Volunteers Spend Their Sunday Sprucing Up Stone Church Cemetery
Joselyn King Trending
WHEELING - Volunteers turned out Sunday to clean gravestones and help preserve a community's history.
Many of the gravestones at the Stone Church Cemetery date back to the late 1800s, and most are covered with dirt and environmental accumulation that's happened over the past century. Some have names and information on them that can't be read, and many are leaning over after their years of standing.
There is even a section of the cemetery for which there is no recorded information about who is buried there.
Friends of Wheeling on Sunday organized a cemetery cleaning and restoration session that had as many as 50 people at its start. Among those participating were members of Boy Scout Troop 6 in Wheeling, the Stone Church Volunteer Fire Department, Engineered Foundational Solutions, and others from the community.
They focused on cleaning the section of the cemetery for which records have been lost, explained Sharon David, an Americorps participant working with Wheeling Heritage on the cemetery project.
"We need to identify who is buried here," she explained. "The volunteers are working mostly in this section so we can later develop and recapture some of the data."
As the volunteers drench the gravestones with the biodegradable cleaning agent D-2 and scrub, the names on many stones do become more visible.
When the names can't be determined, the volunteer takes a photo of the stone through a mobile app that marks its coordinates. This will allow David and others to research and determine who is buried there.
Paul and Terry Camilletti said they participated in a similar clean up at the cemetery last May as certified West Virginia master gardeners. During their effort, they discovered a stone they determined belonged to someone named "John" who was an infantryman who passed during the Civil War era, based on information they could read. But they couldn't make out the last name of the deceased.
"We're going to go back and visit him today and see how he is doing," Terry Camilletti said.
At 1 p.m. the work session took a break so that the Fort Henry Chapter, Sons of the American Revolution could dedicate a sign it had placed in the cemetery honoring the 17 Revolutionary War soldiers who are buried there.
The sign lists the names and life dates of each soldier and features a QR code that when scanned takes you to a history of the cemetery and profiles of the soldiers with photographs of their gravesites.
The cemetery has been in operation since 1795 and remains an active burial ground, according to Jay Frey with the Friends of Wheeling.
There was even construction equipment present to help right the gravestones that were most off their foundation. This impressed Jamie Billman, a preservation manager with the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia.
"I go to a lot of cemeteries for preservation events, but typically I don't see people bring their own heavy equipment," she said.
Peggy Niebergall helped organize the effort for the Friends of Wheeling. She thanked the Ohio County commissioners for providing a $1,500 community grant to assist in the purchasing of cleaning supplies and other items needed for cemetery clean up workshop.
"We plan to do this again in the spring," she said.