This week we had the wonderful opportunity to head out to Bareneed with the Port de Grave Peninsula Historical Society, to teach some of their seasonal staff how to safely clean and care for their historic burial grounds! We had been trying to find a warm enough day to get out there for weeks, and the April weather finally gave us a little break and some sunshine, so we were able to pack up the car and head over for the day.
We started out in the meeting room of the annex behind the Canon Richards Tea Room, which has the best view of any meeting room I’ve ever seen! We gave a little presentation to the staff about the do’s and don’ts of gravestone cleaning, along with info about the types of stone weathering, symbolism, and examples of some types of repairs that we’ve done in the past so they could see what is able to be done. We had a bunch of questions and a good chat, and had a lovely time!
Then we headed out with everyone to the site! I’m actually not sure of the site’s name, but it was located on Playground Road, and had an amazing view over Conception Bay. There first photo above shows some amazing examples of work by Alexander Smith, an early 19th-century gravestone carver in St. John’s, that we’d never seen before! There were four examples in the site with a central cherub below a draped cloth, with cutouts below that you could see through! We cleaned two of them, and they are just gorgeous!
We cleaned a few stones together, took a lunch break in the historic school-turned-tea house, and then headed back out! In the afternoon, we decided to clean a fallen gravestone to reset! The stone we chose was marble and we had to excavated around where it has fallen to see if it had a base, and if that base was in enough shape to reset. The stone had enough space below the inscription to reset into the ground without a base, but it turned out that not only was the sandstone key intact, but the broken pieces of marble set in the key was in excellent shape!
We cleaned the whole stone with the team, and prepared a new foundation for the stone with tamped crusher dust to create a level foundation for the base. Moving the key is always the hardest part, but we got it in place, and showed them how to level a stone when resetting. Since we weren’t expecting to do any break repairs at the workshop, we had to leave the top of the stone on the ground with a plan to come back in the next couple weeks to finish the repair!
Thank you to the Port de Grave Peninsula Heritage Society for having us out to the community, we had a wonderful time spending the day showing you all how to clean the gravestones in your care!
Black Cat Cemetery Preservation 