Cleaning headstones to honor those that gave all

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — The gentle removal of dirt and discoloration from the headstones of young soldiers killed in action and interred in Bloomfield Cemetery is currently being undertaken.

Micheal Perrone, a mason and president of the Belleville Historical Society, with a few workers, is at this task.
Perrone has been cleaning the accumulation of years from the names and dates of these shortened soldiers’ lives interred in northern New Jersey graveyards since 2002 because he feels it is his patriotic duty.

He began his labor at the Old Dutch Reformed Church in Belleville.
“The church had been just about abandoned,” he said recently at the Bloomfield Cemetery. “We took out 20 truck loads of debris and reset the stones and built a Revolutionary War monument. There wasn’t one there.”

Sixty-eight Revolutionary War veterans are buried in Belleville, he said. There are 38 from that war buried in Bloomfield. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution helped with some of the costs in Bloomfield.

“It’s a big project here in Bloomfield,” Perrone said. “A lot of the monuments are marble. They’re soft and porous. Granite is easier to clean, but most of the stone here is marble.”

Power washing the stones is not done, he said, but on low pressure, a power washer can be used for rinsing. Cleaning is done by hand. But there is one cleaning agent, D/2 Biological Solution, which can be applied and left on the stone to clean the surface. But Perrone, wanting to clean as many headstones as possible by this Memorial Day, said cleaning is by hand.

“When you have to get the work done, it’s very labor intensive,” he said.
Perrone goes to 15 cemeteries in northern Jersey to clean headstones. In Bloomfield, he works at the Glendale, Mount Olivet and Bloomfield cemeteries.
“Our focus is the young men killed in action,” he said. “It’s not right for an 18-year-old killed in action to have a headstone in disrepair. I don’t like to use the word ‘dirty.’ You don’t like to say that.”

Official military grave markers are more prone to become soiled because they lay flat on the ground. But a blackened military grave marker of a young man killed in action is unacceptable, Perrone said.

He added that the Belleville Historical Society knows where every veteran is buried in northern New Jersey and where every Belleville and Nutley veteran was buried world wide. He credits two books for this knowledge, both by Anthony Buccino: “Nutley Sons” and “Belleville Sons.” They contain the biographies of soldiers, from those two towns, killed in action, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War.

Perrone said he is sure he will be cleaning headstones and monuments for another 20 years and he is glad he’s gotten some help..
“A lot of young people have gotten involved,” he said, mentioning students from Nutley High School, but they are permitted only to do some cleaning because some of the markers are easily damaged.
“These stones are very old,” he said. “Cleaning them requires experience. You can’t put pressure on some of these stones. The natural tendency is to brush hard.”
He demonstrated how to lightly clean a headstone.
“You’re barely touching some of these stones when you brush,” he said. “The students help us with the granite. It’s the rock of ages. You can shoot a bullet at granite and nothing will happen.”
Perrone said it is sometimes necessary for him to repair damaged statuary. This is accomplished by creating molds into which white concrete is poured to recreate the missing part that will be cemented into place.

At the Bloomfield Cemetery, he was cleaning the headstones of two Civil war officers, a New Jersey governor and 10 Revolutionary War soldiers. At the Glendale Cemetery, he had finished cleaning 261 markers of service men killed in the Vietnam and Korean wars and was working on the markers of World War II casualties. At Mount Olivet Cemetery, another five WWII casualties, from Belleville, had their markers cleaned.

“What we find has been pretty amazing and humbling,” he said of his work.