CEDAR CREEK STONE
RESTORATION
2005-2006
All rights reserved
Background shows the back side
of how the headstones were repaired in October
2006
During the summer of 2005 we
hired a restoration group to come in and straighten our headstones
and to find buried ones.
They would raise up the side(s)
of the large headstones and place limestone under to level.
They also probed and witched and
tried to find any buried headstones.
Most of the buried ones had no
writing or just initials on them. I believe they found two with
detailed writing.
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Menu for headstone pages at bottom of this web
page.
There were many stones that were
tipped and needed repair.
You can see some of them in this
picture.
Flags show those to be worked on
in the summer of 2005.
These were all dug out of ground
in 2005. These stones appear to be hand cut or out of a river. They
were found in rows spaced about three to four feet apart. Thus we
believe that they some how marked a grave site. We did not know what
to do with them so decided to try to mount in cement and place
upright as we feared if mounted in cement poured in the ground the
mower would soon break them. Some are not very thick. You will see
one thin one has decided to fall off. Will need to try epoxy to see
if it will stay on. I used acrylic additive in the cement to make it
less porous.
Many of the stones we dug up had
no writing on them or sometimes just an initial. But they were spaced
about three to four feet apart so we believed they were used as
headstones or else laid on top of the grave to mark the site.
Many early Quakers in North
Carolina did not use headstones to mark their graves so I feel this
idea may have come to Iowa with them. In Penn. they still require all
headstones to be the same size. They believed that we are not
superior to another person in life nor in death. Hope Winslow Stanley
of North Carolina stated it this way "It was thought to be too
worldly to have tombstones, with river stones/field stones all were
equal." Marilyn Bigelow "It was not unusual for a person to have a
simple fieldstone to mark the grave..." They were done that way in
the Quaker cemetery near Pelham, MA.
"Funerals
and burying grounds of the Friends were taken care of by a special
committee. For a long time Quakers were generally opposed to any
marker on a grave. Many of the older burying grounds in Indiana were
merely field stones and some are unmarked. The burying grounds were
usually kept fenced." from http://www.centertownship.org/quaker.html
Then you take the lack of money
or availability of someone to make the headstones, thus they did what
they were able to do to mark the graves.
The restoration group choose to
replant the older stones that had fallen over so deep that some of
the writing was buried. An example below. This was unacceptable to me
so they placed wood on the back of about twenty of the headstones. By
spring 2006 seventeen of those had become unglued and in October 2006
Richard and I epoxied blocks to the back of the old stones and
replanted them in limestone. Pictures follow that relate to that
project.
First is the one with about half
of the writing buried. They redid with two pieces of wood attached to
the back which came off.
The twenty year wood rotted off
one of them in one year.
Second picture is what it looked
like after we fixed the headstone in October 2006 and then chalked to
read it.
The second picture reads Amon
Hockett, son of J and S. J. Hockett, died 1st Mo. 13th 1865. Aged 1
Yr. 11. Mo. and 8 Ds.
We purchased a special epoxy and
we purchased some cement path pavers that were the half size, not the
square size.
We epoxied this cement path
paver to the back of the stone
and from the background picture
you can see that about four to five inches of it appears above
ground.
You can see some of the wood
pieces that had been on the back. Richard is using one to measure for
depth.
There are three stones here that
have been glued and are ready to set.
Richard removing that last dirt
form the hole or else packing down the limestone base.
We also added limestone around
the side about one half way up and then filled with the old
dirt.
Placing the headstone into the
hole. I did not have my camera the day before when we were epoxing
them. The one to the left has just been
completed.
The material we used was mixed
with the hardener on the job and had to set for twenty-four hours. I
don't think the headstone is going anywhere
now.
We will follow with pictures of
the stones we repaired and then then about one hundred fifty-five
more of the older stones, which we chalked and then I photographed.
Newer marble headstones not photographed and all from the old part.
(south)
Return to
Index Page
Repaired and Preserved
Headstones and Fieldstone.
Page
two of repaired
headstones -
eight
Page
one stones with no writing or just initials and/or
name - 7 with
initial
Page
two of stones with no writing or just
initials - 11 blank
stones
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Page two of repaired headstones - eight |
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Page one stones with no writing or just initials and/or name - 7 with initial |
Page two of stones with no writing or just initials - 11 blank stones |
