Whoever was laid to rest in Alna Cemetery in the 1800s, they meant something to someone, Denise Bizer said. That's why she feels it's important to help honor Alna's dead centuries later.

Daughter Kennedy Schoonover feels the same. On Thursday, Sept. 13, the Waldoboro women were sitting in the grass scrubbing some of the cemetery’s oldest gravestones clean. Schoonover was working on one bearing one of the oldest family names in town, Albee. The Route 218 cemetery lies next to Albee Farm that continues with Tom Albee.

The two women and other area residents have been helping tend the stones this summer. Bizer showed the Wiscasset Newspaper a stone she and Alna’s Chris Cooper pieced back together and put upright on a new base.  “It’s completely solid now. It’s not going anywhere,” she said.

“You can still see the impression (the stone) left,” in the ground where it had lain broken after an apparent prior fix, who knows when or by who, Bizer said. “I mixed the epoxy to match the stone,” she recalled of the repair earlier this summer. The stone states Spencer D. and Hannah Nelson’s daughter Margaret died Feb. 25, 1859 at 31.

Bizer then pointed out two nearby stones with their lower ends newly exposed and clean. They had sunken inches into the ground, she explained.

Sometimes as she cleans a stone, she talks a little to the person or family named on it, she said. “This (work) is making it so they matter again.” The stone she was cleaning bore the name Adelaid at the top. According to the front, the 1-year-old daughter of Moses and Octavie Bragdon died Sept. 4, 1868, 150 years ago this month.

As needed, the gravestone cleaning product D/2 is used, but dish soap and water work for most of the cleaning, “dish soap and elbow grease,” Bizer added, smiling as she and Schoonover continued brushing at the stones under a blue midday sky. 

“I’m really enjoying that we’re getting to do this,” Schoonover said. “It feels a little bit like, we’re putting things right for them.”