I have been working along with my mother and my cousin Dee Dee to repair tombstones in an old cemetery in the woods in Wabash County, Indiana. On our last trip we were resetting stones and making repairs to those that had broken.
This stone is one we have wondered about for awhile:
It just seemed like an awful large stone to have sunk so far into the ground.....then my cousin had one of those "ah ha" moments! Months before we had found part of a stone further in the woods. She thought maybe the markings on that piece matched this stone. She and her friend went into the woods and brought the large stone out and set it next to this one.
A perfect match!
We were so excited! My husband got a shovel and began to carefully dig around the set stone so we could repair the break and make the stone whole again! But he quickly ran into a problem....the stone in the ground had been rest in concrete.
There is no way to repair this stone now without doing further damage. My heart sank.
The person who set the stone in concrete believed they were doing the right thing. I'm sure they thought the other part of the stone was lost forever. If only they had just reset the stone in pea gravel and dirt.
When making repairs please be sure that all repairs you make are reversible. The products we use can all be removed in the future without doing any damage to the stones. If they fall over again they will break in the same place and not cause further breaks. The epoxy can be carefully scraped off and replaced with new.
William Spradling's stone was from 1852. How I wish we could have made it whole again.....
Such a pity.
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