GSP students learn gravestone care at city cemetery

MURRAY – Some of the oldest gravestones at the Murray City Cemetery got some much-needed care and attention this week as students with the Governor’s Scholars Program at Murray State University learned methods for cleaning and preserving the antique stone materials.

Murray State is one of three universities hosting GSP this year, with the other two being Centre College and Morehead State University. It is the first year since 2018 that Murray State has hosted the program, with more than 350 high school-age scholars from all over the state. The program concludes in Murray on July 29.

Tana Field, whose regular job is as an associate professor of music at Murray State, is teaching a class at GSP on historical and cultural traditions, while Dalton York has been teaching about rites of passage throughout life.

“We’ve been talking about birth, adolescence, weddings, and now we’re moving into death and funerals for the last two weeks of the program,” York said wryly. “Moving into death in my classes has been a lot more somber than what we talked about last week. Last week, we planned a prom for the GSP community, and we immediately went from that to talking about death and funerals. It’s a bit of whiplash.”

The classes took the field trip on Tuesday morning, a few hours before the severe thunderstorm rolled through town. Jim Seaver, community engagement coordinator at the Kentucky Historical Society, runs the Frankfort-based organization’s cemetery initiatives. Since he used to be on the GSP faculty, he said was very happy to assist Field and York with a class project involving caring for cemeteries.

“I spent about a decade on the faculty of the Governor’s Scholars Program, and I came back to work with these classes,” Seaver said. “They’re studying traditions and rites of passage, and right now, cemetery preservation is actually a really hot topic on TikTok, of all things; it’s a little surprising. We wanted to come out here and do a nice outreach project that would get students working out in the community. It’s amazing to watch the transformations that have been made on these headstones. You can take a before and after photo and see a big difference, so it’s nice to be here, and we’re very grateful to Murray for hosting us.”

Seaver said he was especially thankful to Tom Emery, the City of Murray’s cemetery sexton, who not only made the logistical arrangements for the scholars to come out, but brought a truck with a water tank and hose for the classes to use. Emery said Field called his supervisor, Solid Waste Manager Ron Allbritten, to ask about bringing the classes, and Emery was more than happy to accommodate them. He said that after Seaver asked him if there was any running water that would be available for the scholars to use, he offered to bring the truck, which he said holds about 500-600 gallons of water.

“When Jim contacted me, he said they were looking for some of the older gravestones, like 1920 and before,” Emery said. “This is the oldest section of the cemetery right here; it’s the original section where it started out as the family cemetery of the people that owned all this land before they sold it to the city and the city took over the cemetery. With a lot of these stones, I’d venture to say that they don’t have any family left, or at least family old enough to remember them. They’re so far removed that nobody comes out to visit them, and (the students) are taking them and bringing the stones back to life. That way, when people drive through, they can maybe see them from the road and say, ‘Wow, that stone looks really nice. I remember when it was covered in soot.’ It will also be a good thing for some of these kids, maybe when they get older and retire, they could go into doing something like this for a small cemetery.”

Similar to the medical profession and the Hippocratic Oath, Seaver said the first rule of cemetery preservation is to “first, do no harm.”

“It’s important to tackle these projects only after you’ve done your homework and learn the right way and the wrong way to do it,” Seaver said. “That’s something that I teach people about a lot in my job with the Kentucky Historical Society, and really, what I do is empower people to go and do this work in their own communities. Once people have done their homework, it’s actually not that expensive to get the tools that you need for this. Just about everything you need can be found at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Rural King and Tractor Supply, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money. So for people who are thinking of doing these kinds of projects, maybe at their own family plot at a cemetery or even if they have a small cemetery on a farm, it’s totally doable as long as you do it the right way.”

Seaver said when cleaning gravestones, people should never use vinegar or regular household cleaners like bleach or dish soap. Dirt, moss, lichen, algae and mold are some of the common substances that accumulate on headstones and gravestones over time, and one of the safest, most cost-effective methods is using Orvus paste, an easy-to-find horse shampoo. He said he often tells people that if you wouldn’t use it on a horse, you shouldn’t be using it on a headstone, and appropriately enough, a horse brush is one of the recommended tools for the job.

“You never want to use a wire brush, and you never want to scrub really hard,” Seaver said. “A lot of it is about having a light touch and working on a stone that can handle it. You don’t want to take a stone that’s already fragile and do more harm than good. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just leave it alone. So we walked around and made sure that every headstone or monument that the students are working on today was safe to work on before we gave them the go-ahead to get started.”

Strangely, Seaver said the reason tombstone cleaning has gotten attention on the internet is because it plays into the social media phenomenon of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). These videos get millions of views on sites like YouTube and TikTok and often involve people whispering into a microphone or doing mundane activities like crinkling wrapping paper, stirring a bowl of soup or making slime out of glue – pretty much anything the audience finds oddly relaxing or soothing and usually featuring some kind of soft noise.

“I was telling them in the classroom that one of the things I love about this work is that it’s very gratifying,” Seaver said. “You actually see it tagged on TikTok with hashtags like #satisfying or #ASMR. I’m not making this up! These videos get millions of hits on social media.”

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