Volunteers brighten up Pleasant Forest Cemetery
Pleasant Forest Cemetery’s board partnered with Veterans Heritage Site Foundation on the project.
“It’s a cool event,” volunteer Nick Pettit said. “I learned facts about the cemetery I didn’t know before.”
“We’re trying to clean the headstones of as many veterans as we can,” said David Stinton, Pleasant Forest Cemetery board director.
“The objective of the Aug. 9 project was to clean some of the older monuments at Pleasant Forest Cemetery,” he said.
Previously, he said, Eagle Scout Parker Morrell cleaned up some of the older monuments made of Tennessee marble, a more fragile material.
“Now, we’re looking at ones that might be 20 to 50 or 75 years that were made of good granite material; but because they’ve been in the shade under a tree or something, they’ve gotten moss, lichen or crud growing on them,” Stinton said.
Kim Robards, another volunteer, said she was with Boy Scout Troop 444 when it came to the cemetery on Memorial Day to place flags on veterans’ graves.
“I like working with the troop at the cemetery,” she added. “(Stinton) asked me to come (to help with the project).”
“The project is a result of our interaction with the Veteran’s Heritage Site Foundation,” Stinton said. “That’s Marilyn Childress (founding member of VHSF).
“We received funding from the Tennessee Society of the Daughters of the Revolutionary War to help with our projects,” Childress wrote to Stinton in an e-mail. “Also, we do some fundraisers throughout the year to support our projects, but we rely on donations from families and others to help clean the cemeteries.”
“She was looking to select privately owned cemeteries — not one that’s part of a big church or something — so that put us in that category,” Stinton said. “She invited us to work with her.”
He explained in an announcement to Farragut Board of Mayor and Aldermen the VHF provided all the supplies needed to clean all the monuments. Volunteers then were asked to pick up the necessary supplies and clean monuments.
Stinton went through the cemetery and made a list of about 70 monuments that are 20 to 50 years old and are dark or covered with grime and hard to read. Most of the monuments were in Sections A, B and D and were mostly in the shade.
“We really appreciate the Veteran’s Heritage Foundation, which funded most of the project,” Stinton said. “The Foundation sponsors the Wreaths Across America in East Tennessee.”
For anyone interested in helping, wreaths will be placed on all the veteran’s graves in the four Farragut and Concord cemeteries Saturday Dec. 13.
