Volunteers clean stone marking pioneers' graves

FEMME OSAGE, Mo. -- As she washed the dinner dishes, Zenita Albers would look out the parsonage kitchen window and lament that most names on the blackened gravestones in the church cemetery could not be read.

It's not right, she would say, and her daughter, Cindy Albers Carr, took her words to heart.

Now, months of work by Carr, her husband and four volunteers in Femme Osage United Church of Christ's old cemetery have made it possible to admire the carved roses and lambs on the headstones and read the inscriptions to the German pioneers who settled the St. Charles County community.

"She loved the church, loved genealogy and knew these pioneers' names were being lost to history," Carr, 65, said of her mother, who died a decade ago.

Carr's father, the Rev. Karl F. Albers, served from 1948 to 1969 as pastor of the church, the second-oldest United Church of Christ church west of the Mississippi River. The church was founded in 1833 as the Evangelische Kirche.

Carr, who lives in north St. Louis County, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she and her husband, Fred, decided last spring to clean the old cemetery in part because they remembered Zenita Albers fretting about it.

They appealed to other church members for help.

Church cemetery committee chairman Don Weiss and his wife, Dot, and church organist Clarence Seht and his wife, Jeanette, volunteered.

Since May, the group has carefully scrubbed the grave markers twice a week, up to eight hours a day.

After a visit with the Daughters of the American Revolution, some Internet research and a workshop on limestone cleaning in Indianapolis with the Indiana Historical Society and the University of Indiana, Cindy Carr found out what not to do and was able to stop an ambitious plan by her husband.

"I would have gone and used a power washer, wire brushes and sandpaper," Fred Carr said. "All would have eventually destroyed the stones."

Before cleaning the porous stones, cleaners should wet them with clear water to protect interiors from chemicals, he said.

When they met at the cemetery on a recent day, committee members were surrounded by buckets of water, natural bristle brushes, stacks of bamboo sticks whittled to points, wooden shish-kebob sticks and homemade paint scrapers made of wood. They use no metal.

Cindy Carr wore plastic gardening clogs to keep her feet dry in the wet grass. Despite scant rain and record-high temperatures, the cemetery grounds remain damp. Femme Osage Creek runs parallel to the cemetery.

Moisture on the limestone headstones helped feed the growth of dark, green-black lichen until it obliterated the names, dates and sentiments chiseled into stone.

Last Sunday, at the church's annual boiled beef and fried chicken picnic, many of the 1,200 visitors stopped by the cemetery to watch Fred Carr give a cleaning demonstration. A few people recognized one of the German names -- which include Laumeier, Hafner, Nadler, Knippenberg, Schachter and Grsnemann -- as that of their ancestors.

With the stones now a clean white or gray, the volunteers say their work is still not done. They next plan to work with a sculptor to learn about resetting the broken stones.