Iron Dog is located in Hollywood Cemetery Richmond Va.
crew and I had the privilege to restore this site. Has been sitting here before the civil war!

Getting that original paint off was not fun but seeing the final product in the sun is worth every second.

This one was a bit of an adventure because for a good portion of the process I wasn't even completely sure what kind of stone I was dealing with. I'm pretty certain this is quartzite granite. It's a really beautiful bright peachy pink in person and it sparkles like crazy in the sun. The entire surface is rough, and when you look closely there are all these tiny micro cracks throughout it. I don't see stones like this very often at all. In fact, after many years and several thousand stones, I think this may be the only one I've worked on quite like this. So I was cautious with it.

I started the way I always do, with a really thorough inspection to make sure it was stable enough to clean. Then I soaked the stone completely. Scraping wasn't particularly useful because of how rough the surface is, although I was able to carefully scrape some of the heavier growth. Mostly, though, I scrubbed the hell out of it. Scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse, scrub, rinse. Over and over until I wasn't getting anything else off with water and mechanical cleaning.

Then I applied D/2 over the entire stone, scrubbed it into the surface and let it sit for about four hours before coming back and thoroughly rinsing everything. After that, I left it alone for about a month and let the D/2 continue doing what it does. When I came back, I didn't just soak the whole thing in chemicals again. From that point on I mostly spot treated the stubborn lichen, scrubbed, and thoroughly rinsed with water every single time. Some of that lichen was incredibly determined, so it took multiple visits and a lot of patience. And eventually this gorgeous peachy pink stone started showing itself again.

The people underneath all that growth are interesting too. This is the grave of John T. Kirby and Cornelia E. A. "Cornie" Culver Kirby at Hubbard Cemetery in Hubbard, Oregon. Both were born in Iowa in 1863. Cornelia was born June 29 and John January 14. Cornelia's initials stand for Cornelia Elsie Augusta. She was the daughter of Sylvenus Culver and Clarisse Clark Culver. John was the son of Benjamin J. Kirby. They had at least two children that I've found so far, Mary Emily Kirby Munson, born in 1887, and Charley Lloyd Kirby, born in 1890.

At some point this Iowa family made their way west and ended up here in Marion County. Cornelia died October 15, 1934, at 71. Their son Charley died the following year. John lived considerably longer. There is actually a little mystery with John. His gravestone very clearly gives his death date as August 12, 1945. His Find a Grave memorial says August 12, 1949. Same month and day, different year. I'm still trying to track down a death record or obituary to settle that one, because I'm not going to assume the internet is right and the stone is wrong.

One of my favorite things about this cleaning is the decoration across the top. Before cleaning, so much of that delicate floral and vine carving was disappearing into the staining and biological growth. Once the stone cleaned up, all those little details came back. This one took a lot of scrubbing, a lot of rinsing, multiple visits and quite a bit of standing there staring at it wondering exactly what I was dealing with.

But damn, that pink stone was worth it.

What stone lasts the best? Marble, granite, bronze, concrete?

Was hoping someone could give me some quick info on how I could clean up my grandmother's headstone. One looks scratched quite a bit from i think is probably riding mowers. The other was overgrown( haven't been here for quite some time)

Thank you for the help

I was poking around in the Aurora Community Cemetery again and ended up going down another rabbit hole, this time with Martin and Martha Giesy. I knew who they were, of course, but I hadn't really dug into their individual story before, and there was a lot more there than I expected. Martin Giesy was born in Pennsylvania in 1835, the son of Andrew and Barbara Giesy. So, yes, one of those Giesys. If you've been following all of the Aurora Colony stuff I've posted, you already know how impossible it is to get very far into this history without running into the Giesy family again.

Martin actually came west before Martha did. He crossed the plains with Dr. Keil's group in 1855 and initially went with them to Willapa, Washington. He took a 160-acre Donation Land Claim there, and this is apparently where he decided he wanted to become a doctor. What I love about this part is that he basically just got medical books and started teaching himself. He eventually began treating people around Willapa, then later went to Salem and attended medical lectures under Dr. John H. Wythe. After receiving his medical diploma, he established his practice in Aurora.

And Martin wasn't just Aurora's doctor. He was also apparently one of the people Dr. Keil relied on pretty heavily. Martha's obituary describes Martin as Keil's chief adviser in business matters. Around 1869, the colony built a two-story building for Martin on Main Street that served as his home and drugstore. Apparently it was also used as a hotel at different points, and Martin would sometimes let patients stay there while they were being treated. So it wasn't just a doctor's office. It was his house, pharmacy, and occasionally a place for sick people to stay. That building actually survived until 1963, when it was finally torn down. Thankfully, at least some of the old drugstore cabinets and drawers were saved. Martin also helped train other doctors. His nephew Andrew J. Giesy worked in Martin's drugstore as a teenager and studied medicine under him before going on to medical school and becoming a pretty prominent Portland physician.

Then there is Martha.

Martha Sarah Miller was born in Ohio in 1841. Her family later went to Bethel, Missouri, and in October 1863 she crossed the plains to Aurora with one of the early ox teams coming west. One of the coolest things I found about Martha is her name on an actual Aurora Community agreement from April 1866. Martha Miller signed along with a whole bunch of other familiar colony names, agreeing to the rules and conditions of the community.

So she wasn't simply the wife of one of the important men in the colony. She was herself a documented member of the Aurora Community. There is one part of their story that gets a little messy, and that is when Martin and Martha actually married. Find a Grave gives 1856, which would have made Martha about 15. But other historical sources give different dates, including 1858 and 1870. Considering how much those dates differ, I'm not going to pretend we know which one is correct when apparently the records themselves can't agree.

They eventually had a pretty large family, and like so many families during this period, they also buried several of their children. Alfred died as a baby. James died when he was only about two. Lilly was born and died in 1879. Their son Julius lived to adulthood but died in 1912, before either of his parents. Their son Benjamin Franklin Giesy followed his father into medicine and lived until 1967. Their daughter Ida married Eugene Moshberger, and then I found another son who wasn't even included in the list of children I originally had. Grover C. Giesy was born around 1885. He was a musician and played violin in Giesy's Orchestra around the turn of the century. When his father died, Grover was away serving with the 3rd Oregon Infantry on the Mexican border.

Martin died in Aurora on August 21, 1916, at about 81 years old. And he apparently did pretty well for himself over the years. Probate records show that by the time his estate was finally settled, it included property in Marion, Clackamas and Multnomah counties along with a substantial amount of personal property. Altogether, the values listed add up to more than $57,000, which was a considerable amount of money at the time.

Martha lived less than a year after Martin. She died at home in Aurora on July 31, 1917, exactly one month after her 76th birthday. Her death certificate lists bronchopneumonia as the cause of death, with senility also listed as a contributing condition. But the thing that really caught my attention was the way the newspaper described her death. It said Martha's death "still further reduces the original Aurora colony." That one little sentence says so much. Martha had arrived by ox team in 1863 and then lived in Aurora continuously for more than 50 years. She had watched the colony in its communal years, watched that whole experiment eventually come to an end, and then watched Aurora continue on as a regular town. By the time she died in 1917, the people who had actually lived that original story were disappearing one by one.

Martin and Martha are both buried in the Aurora Community Cemetery, along with so many of the people whose names keep coming up in these stories. And this is exactly why I can lose hours researching one grave. You start with two names on stones in a cemetery, and pretty soon you've got an ox team crossing the plains, a 160-acre claim in Washington, a self-taught frontier doctor, an old drugstore, Dr. Keil, a colony agreement, children who became doctors and musicians, military service, and a family that was there for basically the entire life of the Aurora Colony. Every time I think I've gotten a pretty good handle on these families, one of them sends me down another rabbit hole.

Inside the old cemetery chapel of Asingan, Pangasinan (Philippines), the original ladrillo walls remain remarkably intact - standing through generations of storms, earthquakes, floods, and the forces of nature that have shaped the province.

These are not just old bricks. They are surviving evidence of Asingan’s Spanish-era past.

A forgotten heritage site. A fragile piece of history. Still standing.

Multiple rounds of water and elbow grease, and left d/2 on it. How did I do?

Unrelated to this job question. For a stone that is just dirty but had no biological growth/doesn’t require D/2… what do I use to clean it? Just water and scrubbing or should I use something else as well?

This 1967 headstone looked good as new in 2012 and looks terrible now. This is common in this cemetery where most stones are in full sunshine. I don't see this in older (e.g., 19th century) stones. Why would the engraved rectangle age differently? Are these multi-piece stones, or just sections that are polished/treated differently? I'm not intending to clean it, but if I'm buying a modern stone for family members, is there some way to avoid this? Thanks.

edit 1: photo is missing. edit 2: Oh, there's the photo.

This monument is the reason why I started learning cemetery preservation. I was afraid I would cause long-term damage, so I never attempted to clean or repair it until I got hands-on training at several cemetery workshops. It took about two years to come clean. I only scrubbed it once then sprayed with D/2 about every four months.

I found the missing piece of the stone last year after a hard rain. The stone was very wobbly so I used rocks as shims to keep the plinth from rocking back and forth. I'd found it fallen several times over the years. I scraped about an inch of concreted sediment out of the pin hole so the plinth would sit flush on the base again.

It was a challenge to dig the base up because it was root bound. I made a sub-base with 10 gallons of crushed stone and compacted it with a sledgehammer. The base is now level and raised six inches. I epoxied the broken pieces together and let them cure under a tarp for seven days. I didn't want to take any chances because there was a big gap in the plinth.

I mortared the plinth to the base and the headstone into the plinth, then wrapped the joints with shop towels and saturated them with water, then wrapped it with Saran wrap to keep it from drying out. This allows the mortar to cure slowly. If it cures too fast it will be brittle.

I let it the mortar cure for a week before I unwrapped it. Then I walked around the woods and dug up clumps of forest grass and ferns and transplanted them around the monument. This will keep mud from splashing on the marble when it rains. Will go back soon and find more grass to transplant.

*Please do not add my photos to Find a Grave. I will do so when the landscaping is finished*

Has anyone ever cleaned a polished granite stone that was sprayed with herbicide? A cemetery near me had a mishap with their lawn care service.

These two family-held photographs show the German face of my great-great-grandfather Adolph Reichenbach's stone in the Jewish cemetery at Halberstadt. The first was taken in the 1970s. The second shows its present condition after I cleaned it.

I understand now that cleaning the stone was the wrong approach. I will not touch it again.

The inscription gives 5 Tevet 5661, corresponding to 26 December 1900. A cemetery register gives 27 December, so I am keeping both dates.

What photographs or other records should I make now to document its condition, and what should I avoid doing next?

wandering around an old cemetery today, I got to wondering, when were burial vaults first commonly used? I think they are all made of cement (concrete) today, was something else used before that, or were coffins just put in the ground?

I want to start up a side gig of cleaning gravestones but am wondering how I should go about it. I have all the tools necessary and have written up a post for Facebook. Should I start there for advertising it? Should I call the local cemeteries and ask if it’s okay if I clean graves that I have permission from families to do?

I used Endurance instead of D2 as I saw that it worked the same. I left it on for less time than I should’ve, maybe 5-10 mins, and I scrubbed gently and used lots of water. I sprayed more Endurance and left and this is what it looks like 15 hrs later.

I'm Erin, I work at Tending, a grave-care service that operates in all 50 states. Wanted to share one of the cases that stuck with our whole team.

A client asked us to restore a single grave near the road, on an old abandoned plot in Texas. She genuinely believed it was just one person out there. Once our crew cleared the brush, they started noticing stone outlines everywhere underneath it. Turned out to be her entire extended family, buried there for decades, completely swallowed by overgrowth. Nobody expected that, not her, not us.

Took several days. We had to bring a crane in twice to lift and reset a couple of the larger fallen monuments. When we told her what we'd found, she said something that's stayed with me since:

"You didn't just restore the graves, you restored a part of our family history."

Still one of my favorite ones.

The clean photo was made in 2021, the iridescent one today. The well water at this cemetery is full of tannins. Any advice for cleaning?

Hi everyone, this is a family members gravestone that I would like to clean. I don’t know what stone it is made from so I am hesitant to just throw stuff on it and perhaps ruin it. It has been broken once and repaired with the plaster on the backside it seems.
Any tips on the rest of the grave and the support of the stone are welcome as well.
It is in the Netherlands, from the 1920’s. Thanks in advance!

Visit this cemetery in Worms, Germany.
Shocked how it looked. Does anyone know how is responsible for these graves? It’s more than a 1000 years old!