A small group of Jefferson City area retirees is trying to bring a little life back to a historic cemetery.
No, it's not the plot of an amateur Halloween thriller; it's a restoration project at the site of the first St. Peter's Cemetery.
The group - Darrell Strope, Darrell Schubert, Linda Dunbar, Roger Hager, Denise Wingate and Nancy Thompson - has been working to restore the cemetery since July.
They have a history of restoring cemeteries and resetting headstones in the Cole County area since the 1990s. They have completely restored 34 cemeteries and done 19 restorations that involved only stone repairs.
"We decided to do St. Peters because it was in such bad shape, and I knew that there were a lot of tombstones out there that had been covered over with dirt," Thompson said. "They need to be saved because it is such a historic cemetery."
The cemetery, which is located behind the Heisinger Lutheran Home on West Main Street, opened with its first burial in 1854. The last recorded burial took place in 1885. The cemetery has 156 recorded burials based off a list made in 1940. However, it's actually unknown how many people have been buried at the cemetery.
"That list in no way represents all of them, that represents the ones he could find in 1940," Thompson said. "I'm told that some of those stones went down that hill, and there's just no way to retrieve them."
The process of restoring the cemetery includes a process called probing, in which the ground is poked with a long stick until something is hit. The dry weather the last three months has set the group back, and they will likely have to finish the job in the spring. The group has found more than 60 stones already, and they still have a little more than half of the cemetery left to search.
"We may be missing some (stones) just because we can't probe that deep, and the ground has been hard all summer, and it's just now kind of softened," Schubert said.
Thompson said she suspects there are more burials than have been recorded because not everyone could afford a headstone at the time, or they were the last surviving member and there wasn't anyone to buy one.
"In many instances, they used native stones, and we've found several of those out there," Thompson said.
A native stone and a headstone base were discovered at the site Tuesday morning.
Once the headstones or bases for the headstones are found, the group digs them up, cleans them off and begins to put them back together if they are broken. If a headstone doesn't have a base, one is poured for it using a special mortar.
"You can't just put regular mortar like you do in brick because it will soften the stone, and it reacts badly with the marble tombstones. So we have a mortar that we mix with lime to make it more friendly with a stone," Thompson said.
The group has been paying for the restorations out of pocket, and the supplies can be quite costly. The product used to clean the headstones - D/2 biological solution - costs the group about $50 a gallon. D/2 not only cleans the stones but prevents the regrowth of moss and algae. The special glue used to piece the headstones back together can cost up to $25 a quart.
Members of the group have also been working with Capitol Monuments to purchase some small tombstones to set with the illegible stones and stone fragments so that future generations can identity someone was buried there.
The group is not looking to add more volunteers, but they would happily accept donations by contacting Thompson at 573-635-0606.