Resources
A short field guide for families — the standards behind the work, how to read a stone in trouble, and a little history of the places we look after.
The Standards I Work From
Monument preservation isn't guesswork. There's a real framework — built by the National Park Service, federal preservation programs, and the academic field of gravestone studies — that defines what's safe, what's reversible, and what crosses the line into damage. This is the body of work I follow, in plain English.
NPS Preservation Brief 48 — Preserving Grave Markers in Historic Cemeteries
The National Park Service's cemetery-specific preservation guide. It covers documentation, cleaning, resetting, repair, and the conditions under which intervention is appropriate. Brief 48 is the single most direct federal reference for the kind of work I do.
Read at the National Park Service →The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties
The federal standards that define preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction. The guiding principle — the least intrusive treatment that achieves the goal — is the same one I apply to every stone.
Read the Standards →National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT)
An arm of the National Park Service that researches preservation methods and products. Their published testing on stone cleaners, consolidants, and biological growth treatments is the technical backbone for how I choose what touches a monument.
Visit NCPTT →Association for Gravestone Studies
The leading academic and practitioner community for gravestone scholarship. Their work covers carving traditions, iconography, regional styles, and conservation ethics — the cultural and historical context behind every stone.
Visit the Association for Gravestone Studies →Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Commission — Cemetery Preservation and Maintenance Manual
A local resource worth knowing. Compiled in 2007 by the Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Commission with assistance from Creative Sculpture and Restoration, partially funded by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the National Park Service. It documents preservation practice with direct relevance to the region I serve.
View the Manual →Is the Stone in Trouble?
You don't need to be an expert to know when something's wrong. Here's how to read what you're seeing — and what to do (and not do) about it.
Signs it needs cleaning
- Black, gray, or white biological growth (lichen, moss, algae)
- Darkening or general discoloration that's worse on the north-facing side
- Inscription becoming hard to read from buildup
- Streaking that returns after rain
- A stone that looks noticeably dirtier than the ones around it of similar age
Signs it needs more than cleaning
- Cracks — hairline or wider, especially through inscription areas
- Leaning, sinking, or shifting at the base
- Joint failure — where the stone meets the base, or between sections of a multi-piece monument
- Spalling — surface flaking, common on weathered marble and sandstone
- Faded or missing inscription paint
- A previous repair that's failing (visible adhesive, mismatched fill, separation)
What NOT to do
- Never bleach. It eats into stone — marble especially — and leaves residue that keeps damaging long after you walk away.
- Never pressure wash. It strips the protective surface and can blast inscriptions out of softer stones.
- Never use wire brushes or metal scrapers. They gouge the surface and leave iron residue that stains the stone permanently.
- Never use household cleaners (Comet, Dawn, vinegar, ammonia). The chemistry isn't designed for stone, and the damage isn't reversible.
- Never assume what worked for Grandma still works today. Affection isn't a method.
Repairs to cracks, joints, and inscriptions on granite and marble are part of what I do. Repairs beyond that — and repairs on bronze, concrete, or sandstone — I refer to a qualified monument maker. Honesty about scope is part of the work.
Cemeteries Worth Knowing
Every cemetery in this region is an open-air archive — names, dates, migrations, and craft traditions that exist nowhere else. A few of them are worth knowing for what they tell us about the people who built the places we still live in.
Old Lorimier Cemetery
On a hill overlooking the Mississippi at 500 North Fountain Street sits a cemetery that has been quietly filling up since before Missouri was a state. Louis Lorimier established Old Lorimier Cemetery between 1806 and 1808 — and the founding story has a romantic, melancholy hook to it. He set aside five acres atop the hill upon the death of his wife Charlotte, then donated the land to the city as a public burial ground. Lorimier himself died in 1812 and was buried next to her, the two of them now marked by a stone pagoda — a fittingly unusual monument for a French-Canadian trader who, by some accounts, was a second cousin to George Washington.
Here's the number that should stop you: more than 6,500 graves are believed to be here, most of them unmarked. That gap between bodies and headstones tells its own grim story. The original records were damaged or destroyed in a fire, and the cemetery has endured a lot of vandalism over the years, leaving large stretches of unmarked ground. Five acres holding the memory of thousands, and the paperwork went up in smoke.
The cemetery is also a map of how the living organized the dead. A sidewalk runs north–south as a dividing line: Catholics on the south, Protestants on the north, and the east slope is believed to be the burial ground of African-American persons. A snapshot of 19th-century social order, carved into the hillside.
Then there's the Civil War, which is where it gets genuinely haunting. As many as 1,200 soldiers are recorded as buried here. Many soldiers were placed in graves containing more than one body, done at night so that Confederate sympathizers couldn't count how many Union soldiers were dying. Add to that the mass graves from epidemics — cholera, smallpox, influenza, yellow fever — that swept through during the cemetery's years of use. This is a place where the burial methods themselves were acts of wartime secrecy and public-health desperation.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. If you go, note that the Fountain Street gate is locked — you enter through the south gate on the Missouri Park side. Bring good walking shoes and a healthy respect for the fact that most of the people resting there will never have their names spoken again.
More cemeteries added over time.