Stones, graves, cemeteries...all behave differently depending on location and environmental exposure. This article will deal with the raising of a stone in a flood-plain cemetery. The photos are necessary because few people really understand the verbal story of what happens when a cemetery is flooded. For the first time that we know of, we'll show you.
Occasionally, cemeteries are located on choice land. The majority, however, are placed on 'poor' ground...ridges, mounds, sandy soiled bottoms, and loose rock areas mixed with some dirt. We're going to deal with the bottomlands.
Everyone can guess what happens to standing stones when tree debris comes roaring down a flooded creek or river. They are snapped, shattered, broken, carried, and some never to be seen again. But other areas don't get much current and backwash areas get no current at all. What happened to those stones that simply disappeared? Well, they went straight down. And they did that very quickly. Silt covered the top of the hole and, to the eye, the stones had vanished without a trace once the grass had grown a season.
My daughter, Cynthia, sits beside the located military stone of Peter Myers. The top of it is 6" under the ground and 39" long. (Barely bigger than a whisper, Cynthia took the photos of the adults shown here using a Canon AE-1 that had to be focused by hand.) The top of another stone had been found by driving the stakes (one visible to the left) and that led me to probe for others. For a while, I was staggered by the concept of how a stone could do this. The clue is in the photo above. Study the horizontal line and think about what it means.
A buried stone, once located, has a few problems attendant to it. First off, it has no hand holds. Secondly, it is not only embedded, it is also held firmly by suction. The first order is to excavate enough ground to break the stone free of suction and then attach handles. For a stone whose bottom is 45 inches underground, you need a posthole digger. You must go down beside it. And then down behind it. After that has been accomplished and the stone can be pushed a little back and forth in two directions, then you must clear ground horizontally to get you down to a surface where you can work with the top 4-6 inches of the stone. A nice, portable monument hoist would be the thing to have at this point with its tripod legs and come-along lifting capabilities. But we're working out of the trunk of our car here with tools that can be transported up a creek if necessary.
Opting for large C-clamps gives us everything we need in the area of attaching either handles or creating a lifting point for a bumper jack. Care has to be taken not to damage the stone so at least a half inch of wood has to be inserted between the clamp and the stone. When the stone top is still above ground, I like to use five foot long 1x2 inch boards. These give easy lifting hand holds on both sides of the stone. Two people can raise a 200 pound stone fairly easily and one person can manage to work it upward a bit at a time by themselves. But that won't work when the stone top is below ground as here. So you clear enough dirt to work the handle of the lower C-Clamp and attach it to the stone. Then by using one or two C-clamps in chain link fashion you reach up to the bumper jack. Gradually the stone is jacked upward, paused, cocked, reclamped until it can be brought upward without the jack which just falls away when muscle takes over.
Everything follows the path of least resistance. You want the stone to come up. But the stone will move opposite the pressure of the jack, ie sideways. So someone has to work the jack and someone else has to apply counter-pressure to the stone to force the action upward. The pressure on the base of the jack becomes a problem if the ground holds even a little moisture as that quickly collapses under the weight. You may have to stop and put wood under the base. But we're almost there.
(Now, how did that stone get down there? The wind is constantly 'sailing the stone' back and forth...in wet weather the ground will move quite a bit, and in summer the ground dries, cracks and shrinks, pulling away from stones and leaving them very loose. I like to set them straight and pour sand around them when this happens. But left unattended, there is a half inch path for water all around the stone down its length. Surface dirt is three feet from an OLD grave cavity while only two feet from a NEW, putting the base of the marker very near the voids around the vault. The stone, denser and above the ground, applies more pounds per square inch vertically than dirt over the grave. Comes a flood or heavy series of rains, and water pours to the base of the stone and bubble by bubble the air rises to the surface. Eventually a mudslide condition occurs on the same principle as quicksand. The soaked mud under the pressure of the stone shoves sideways into the voids and the stone slides downward in its channel. A couple feet or more can be accomplished almost instantly. The silt above fills over the stone and no trace remains when the water goes down.)
At this point, its a matter of muscle. Care has to be taken not to tip the stone off the vertical as two people can accidentally apply enough pressure to snap a stone of this thickness and thinner, especially if one falls. A bump or graze from a lawnmower has broken thousands upon thousands of stones. The top photo of the reset stone shows the line that years wore away. This particular section had over 200 soldier's graves and the original setter liked to use 19 inches above ground. I prefer 21 and matched this stone's height to the others I'd set. Had the stone sank gradually, a series of horizontal marks would have been on the face. The stone is weathered uniformly above the original set line.
A stone of this size leaves a whopping hole behind that has to be prepared before resetting can occur. You know the grave cavity was opened so you need to drop a few large rocks down first. Pour in dry sand and tamp that around. Then fill up to the top rock with water. Tamp that down. Sand is not usable for the entire cavity because IT DOES FLOW. Goes in easy, flows out from under the stone easy. The rest of the hole is filled with damp, tamped-in soil. Level that and set the stone back in place, orienting as needed. Just like baking a cake. Brush down with a soft brush, wash, and then bleach.
The new military stones are 43 inches long (+4 inches), wider, and thicker ... almost 80 pounds heavier. Very hard for one person to handle. The "Peter Myers" stone is the second issue of government stone. The first was a lightweight marble, almost all sugared away now, and they were only two inches thick and always snapped off at ground level. Rare to find one standing and recognize it for what it was.
I've done a lot of things in my life but none of them was as satisfying to me as volunteering my time to repair cemeteries. My wife served under duress most of the time but occasionally wanted to see where I was going. My little shutterbug has grown up now with a family of her own, but still lives within driving for dollars distance. GCW