There is a tombstone lying on the bed of Ashley Shares’ pick-up truck.

No, she’s not vandalizing cemeteries. The Atlanta resident is a restoration specialist and is currently employed at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. She also is a consultant to others looking to repair and restore broken gravestones.

The tombstone she’s working on comes from the Hart family cemetery, enclosed and sitting on land that was bought by Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. Though it looks like two separate stones — one a dingy marble with rust-colored veins and one grayish in color — the single stone was broken in half, with one piece buried beneath ground, the other remaining above.

That’s not uncommon in old cemeteries, Shares said. At the Southview and Westview cemeteries in Covington, there are headstones that are deteriorating. Some are broken, some just dirty. Ground has settled, causing some stones to lean. Tree branches have knocked over others.

Shares had worked with Scott Gaither, Planning Engineer with the city of Covington when she helped write the city’s design guidelines. The guidelines illustrated those modern monument designs that were in keeping with the historical markers. Illustrations of those monuments that should be discouraged include tombstones shaped like a moon, black granite tombstones and curbs and a tombstone with a realistic-looking carving of a guitar.

“While you can’t tell a family ‘no,’ [to monument’s design], you can make recommendations,” Shares said. “[Some] more modern monuments don’t really fit in a historic cemetery.”

“When I helped write the city’s design guidelines (for gravestones), Scott Gaither said he wanted a preservation and maintenance plan,” she said. “He wanted an outline of the condition of the graves and how to fix them, the trees conditions, either in bad condition or need to be cut down because they’re a threat to the cemetery.”

The work began in December 2015 and ended in April. The resulting 90 page document became part of the work she did to complete a master’s in historic preservation at Georgia State University.

A native of the south side of Chicago, Shares did her undergraduate work at St. Xavier College in Chicago, but because she wanted to live in the South, applied for graduate schools in Kentucky, the Carolinas, Alabama and Georgia.

She liked the program at GSU because there was a great deal of flexibility in the projects graduate students could undertake. And while she says she admires those who do archival research for historical preservation, she prefers a more hands-on approach.

Research takes too long, she said, and “so often runs into dead ends. It’s rewarding to start a project that you can see to the end.”

A restoration specialist at Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, Shares has done independent projects in Buckhead, Columbus and other areas, as well as small projects for families.

“It’s hard work, but it’s very rewarding,” she said.

Wear, tear and other problems

In the two Covington cemeteries, primarily Southview, granite or marble curbs outline family plots. Within those plots are the graves and markers. Covington had already invested in mapping out possible grave sites by using ground penetrating radar (GPR).

“The thing with GPR just be there’s a blip on the radar, it doesn’t mean it’s a grave,” Shares said. “It could be different ways soil compacts or other anomalies like a rock or an old tree root. Just because there’s no headstone doesn’t mean there’s not a grave. The curbs outline a family plot, but also terraces the land.”

In some areas, the curbs are broken or have sunk unevenly creating a snake like line of stones. Headstones have shifted as the ground settles or roots grow through graves, causing the stones to lean or fall over.

At the two Covington cemeteries, Shares said, “we’re dealing with normal deterioration. Rain, especially because there is acid in rain with heavier concentrations near a big city, can cause damage.

Natural deterioration can be caused by acid rain, the shattering of stones along imperfections in the stone, such as veining in marble, making it easier to split. Head stones can be cracked by a tree branch or knocked over. Though rare, vandalism can also come in to play in determining the damage to the head- and footstones.

Damage can also be caused by maintenance equipment like weed whackers and lawn mowers, she said.

“Over time, tombstones will erode,” she said. “If you have high quality of marble, it’s less likely to deteriorate; lesser-quality marble can be fragile. Granite and limestone are also used for headstones – granite is tough; limestone is easily shattered.”

In making her recommendations for the preservation and maintenance of the two cemeteries, Shares looked at every head- or footstone, one-by-one. She recorded where the tombstones were, their condition and what was needed to restore the cemetery.

She said the oldest headstone she found in Southview Cemetery was from 1834. Burials, however, began in the 1820s according to records, she said. In addition to the old churchyard graves and the Confederate cemetery, there is an African-American cemetery in Southview, ironically located kitty-corner from the Confederate graves.

Westview Cemetery in the Sand Hill neighborhood of Covington was largely African American with the oldest graves dating to the earliest 20th century, she said.

Restoring a headstone

The first step in restoring a tombstone is to make sure all the pieces are there, Shares said. Pieces can be scattered nearby, sunk below the soil line or thrown aside because someone doesn’t realize it’s part of a tombstone.

Missing pieces can sometimes be found using an iron probe with handles, gently sticking it into the ground to see if pieces of the stone have been buried.

The process of restoring a tombstone depends on the type of stone and the size, Snare said. For a small headstone, she cleans the marble, granite or limestone and gently cleans the broken edges. Epoxy is used to glue the pieces together, and a trowel or finger is used to clean the excess epoxy away.

For a larger stone, 2-feet-by-3-feet or larger, stainless steel rods are used like dowels to hold the broken pieces together. Two holes are drilled on the interior edges of each broken piece and filled with epoxy. The pieces are put together and the excess epoxy is smoothed away.

Once the stones are glued together, the pieces are clamped. “If anything leaks out, you clean it out then wait until it sets,” she said. “It takes two to three hours, normally, though it sets faster in heat and humidity.”

Historically accurate mortar, usually made of limestone and tinted to match the color of the gravestone, is used to seal the fissures. The mortar is smoothed either usually with a trowel or a sponge.

The rise of cemeteries

Prior to the 1830s, cemeteries really didn’t exist. Most families buried their dead in small plots on their land or in church yards. Small family graveyards remain, such as the Hart family cemetery on Atlanta’s airport land, and are surrounded by fences and left intact, even if the family has long since moved away.

The oldest section of Southview Cemetery, she said, was the old Methodist-Episcopal church’s burying ground. The old church once sat on the cemetery grounds in the northwest corner.

In 1831, land on the border between Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, four miles west of Boston, became the first rural cemetery in the United States. Inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Mt. Auburn combined the park-like setting of grassy hills, winding drives and an arboretum with a graveyard, unaffiliated with a single family or a religious institution. It was the beginning of the cemetery movement in America.

Perpetual care came into being in early 19th Century America — Mt. Auburn in Boston and Greenwood in the Bronx are the first of the perpetual care cemeteries. Modern stones are frequently little more than markers set flat into the ground to allow for lawn maintenance.

Death was a normal part of life, something that was not sanitized and set away from people’s day-to-day lives, Snare said.

“Cemeteries were a place where people gathered in the 19th century,” she said. “They weren’t scary place."

Shares, who is employed as a restoration specialist at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, said the tradition of being a gathering place for people continues at some area cemeteries. “At Oakland we have music festivals, picnics and other events,” she said.

“Just as modern culture is more comfortable with death moved safely away from the living, the 19th and 18th Century beautified death,” she said. “People were familiar with it because it happened at home.

“There’s a sterilization of death that came after the Civil War, which was also when embalming came into practice,” she said.

That decline of uniqueness reflecting someone’s life or beliefs is evidenced in the uniformity of the tombstones in the Confederate cemetery at Southview. Eventually, as many families began moving away from an area, memorial parks with large swathes of grass peppered with gravestones that lie flat against the ground making maintenance easier began to replace the older cemeteries.

Shares said the modern stones are commercially produced, but earlier stones, particularly those from the 19th Century were carved by actual stone cutters. “It was an art form,” she said.

The story of a community

The Southview Cemetery in Covington, simply because of its age, has more examples of that 19th Century art form and the societal comfort with death and the stones are often carved or engraved with symbols.

“There’s a headstone in the old section in Southview that has a carving of the grim reaper tapping someone on the shoulder,” she said. “It’s in perfect condition. It’s beautiful.”

There are many obelisks in the older sections, usually carved with some sort of symbol such as a Masonic compass or a hand pointing to heaven. There are tombs that look like boxes, tombstones with carved edges that look like a spiral of ribbons.

Shares favorite grave is in the oldest part of the cemetery, under a huge tree. A cairn, or stack of rocks, there are tree roots growing out of them.

Cemeteries can tell a lot about the history of an area, she said. “It’s a way to learn about infant mortality rates, epidemics, socio-economics and trade networks. By looking at stones and the materials used, you can learn so much about the people — their wealth, status, ethnicity and religion.

“When the written records are destroyed — fires in the courthouse, floods — cemeteries are the only records we have,” she said.

In her overview of the preservation and restoration plan, Shares writes, “Cemeteries are important cultural landmarks. Besides being sites of memory and mourning, they offer educational opportunities as well as peaceful park-like environments. For a historically significant city like Covington, Westview Cemetery and Southview Cemetery can serve as an important resource, augmenting the rich abundance of heritage sites already being preserved.”