Old cemeteries may seem spooky to some, but to John Collette and Tom Simpson, of Collette Monuments, they’re enduring records of community history worth preserving.
The Lewiston-based family business has been making and restoring gravestones, monuments and memorials since 1971, said John Collette, a restorationist and grandson of the company’s founder, Roland Collette. John’s father, Bruce, and brother, Luc, also work for the business.
“We make a full range of gravestones (and) veterans monuments; we letter death dates in cemeteries when somebody dies and they already have a stone,” John Collette said. “We also repair and clean the stones, obviously.”
Collette and Simpson are working in Harpswell for several weeks to restore stones and monuments in the cemetery behind the town-owned meetinghouse in Harpswell Center. The historic structure was built in the mid-1700s and the cemetery contains stones dating back as far as 1764.
The cemetery contains more than 500 gravestones and monuments, as well as curbing — low stone borders that outline individual graves or family plots. On a morning in late September, Collette and Simpson were out cleaning the gravestones, one by one.
They used plastic putty knives to gingerly scrape away moss, lichen and other organisms from the stones. Then, they sprayed each stone with a product called D/2 Biological Solution, a growth remover specifically formulated for use on historic gravestones, monuments and building facades.
After letting the D/2 do its work, Collette and Simpson rinsed off each stone with water. They said the cleaning solution continues to work even after rinsing, lightening the gravestones’ color over days or weeks as the remaining organic matter naturally decays.
“It takes time — this work is slow,” said Simpson, a stone seller at Collette Monuments who sometimes helps out with gravestone cleaning. “Over time, (the stones) will get brighter and cleaner.”
The town of Harpswell hired Collette Monuments in September to perform the restoration work at an estimated cost of just under $20,000. The company has been performing similar work for the town over the past several years, according to a Sept. 2 memo from Town Administrator Kristi Eiane to the Harpswell Select Board.
“Because of the historic nature of these stones, we need a company with a proven track record to perform extensive and careful cleaning of the stones,” Eiane wrote in the memo. “There is concern that pressure washing may destabilize the stones, and that a better approach would be to clean (them) by hand-scrubbing with a brush.”
John Collette said cleaning and restoring historic gravestones is a big part of the work his company does, especially given that Maine has such an extensive history.
“We did one (job) in Winthrop that was huge — it was like 1,000 stones or something,” he said. “We restored them to the proper level, picked them up, fixed them if they were broken. Sometimes we use a litho-epoxy mix to fill in parts that are missing.”
Collette said the company’s dedicated staff performs painstaking, detail-oriented tasks that require great care to avoid damaging the gravestones.
“We have a great crew that works hard,” he said. “There are a lot of jobs that are tedious, and you can mess up a stone pretty easily.”
