As vice president of Union Cemetery’s Historical Society, a large part of Heather Faries’ role is to help preserve Kansas City’s oldest public burial ground. To that end, she’s been offering workshops to volunteers since last spring on how to clean gravestones without damaging them.
For the small crowd gathered for a workshop on a recent fall morning, it was a chance to get a hands-on lesson in local history.
“We're going to go on a little bit of a hike,” Faries warned, as she led them to an area in the cemetery called Founders Row. “There's quite a few larger stones up there that we're going to work on today.”
As the volunteers made their way up a hillside path, they passed the graves of Kansas City pioneers, like John Calvin McCoy, the founder of Westport; Alexander Majors, a prominent Pony Express operator; and George Caleb Bingham, best known for his paintings of frontier life along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
This spring the cemetery was awarded an $800 grant from Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, a nonprofit that preserves unique cultural and historic sites in western Missouri and eastern Kansas.
The money will help Faries clean and maintain the graveyard’s 5,000 marble and granite markers, and was enough to purchase supplies for more than a dozen cleaning classes the cemetery offered this year. The classes have proven to be so popular that the cemetery announced another session in early November.
So far, cemetery volunteers have cleaned more than 300 gravestones. Faries estimated the project will take several years to complete.
“Not everyone likes to pick up a book and read about history,” Faries said, “so we’ve been creating ways people can access history and interact in a different form.”
‘If you want to clean … definitely ask’
The practice of cleaning gravestones has been attracted wide attention online. In 2022, TikTok videos that included the hashtag #gravetok had more than 750 million views, according to The Guardian. The hashtag refers to videos of or related to people cleaning graves.
More recent viral videos of headstone cleaners like Kaeli Mae McEwen, known as Clean Girl, have garnered millions of views, partly because of the history they explore and partly because of the video’s ASMR qualities, which is that tingling sensation so often stimulated by scratching, squishing or crunching sounds.
Influencers like McEwen, who is developing her own brand of cleaning foam, have also created controversy, though, by racking up millions of views by cleaning the graves of strangers, often without permission.
“Most cemeteries are totally cool if you're cleaning your own family stone,” Faries cautioned, “but double check with the cemetery.”
At Union Cemetery, volunteers who take Faries’ class can sign up to work on designated stones on their own or during group volunteer days.
Rules at other cemeteries vary, and Faries warned cleaners to always get permission before reaching for soap and a scrub brush. The National Park Service also offers more information about cleaning historic gravestones on their website.
“If you want to clean other peoples’ (markers), definitely ask,” Faries said.
Sweeping away years of grime
Faries demonstrated her cleaning method to volunteers on a five-foot tall obelisk covered in lichen.
Checking the condition of a stone before starting is an essential first step, she said.
“If you go to a stone, you rub it, and it comes off on your fingers, that's called sugaring,” Faries said. “That means that the stone has already deteriorated enough that it's sugaring off on your fingers, and you don't want to scrub it.”
After years of weathering in the elements, markers can also become unstable, so personal safety can be a concern too.
“You need to make sure that it is structurally sound, because you don't want a stone to break in half and fall on your toes,” she said. “That's not a good day for anybody.”
As for the cleaning, Faries recommends using soft-bristle brushes because historic gravestones can be very fragile.
“Don't use wire brushes, because you're going to hurt the stones,” she said.
Cleaning a gravestone while it is dry is also strongly discouraged. Without liquid, the intense abrasion from a brush can cause irreparable damage, Faries said.
With the ground rules explained, Faries released the volunteers to begin their first cleaning.
“I picked this one because it's really beautiful,” said Kaelyn Whitt, headed for a marble tombstone decorated with carved scrolls and flowers. The epitaph was obscured by a thick layer of lichen.
“This is a very young person who was 18 years at the time of their passing,” she said. “I just want to give him some extra special attention today.”
First, Whitt carefully sprayed the entire marker with a biodegradable cleaning fluid called D/2 Biological Solution that loosens lichen without damaging stone. After the liquid soaked in for several minutes, Whitt began to gently scrub away years of dirt and grime with the bristles of a brush. Whitt completed the process by rinsing everything with water.
Over the next six months, naturally-occurring water like rain and dew will reactivate the cleaning solution, so the chemicals will continue to clean the stone long after it has been treated.
“I've just always been fascinated by keeping people's memory alive in different ways,” Whitt said. “It's such a human thing that we all do.”
Under the stage name Midge Munster, Whitt co-hosts a dark history podcast called Ghouls Night In that explores the culture and traditions of all things spooky. A recent episode explored the history of cemeteries and the meaning of tombstone iconography.
“It's funny: I grew up thinking I didn't like history, and now I've found things like this and I realize I actually love history,” Whitt said. “This really brings it to life for me.”
Whitt’s careful cleaning this time helped reveal the gravestone of Spencer C. McCoy, the only son of Westport founder John Calvin McCoy.
Spencer McCoy was born in 1844, and joined the Confederate army during the Civil War. He died at the Second Battle of Springfield in 1863, where troops under the command of Brig. Gen. John S. Marmaduke assaulted Union forces in an effort to disrupt supply lines to the west. The raid ended in defeat, and Confederate soldiers retreated to Arkansas.
It wasn’t until months later that John Calvin McCoy could travel to Springfield to retrieve his son’s body for burial in the family’s Union Cemetery plot.
“To have this smack dab in the middle of our downtown area is such a cool thing,” Whitt said. “The fact that it's open to the public and you can come walk and enjoy history while you're taking a stroll or having your lunch is really special.”
More than just a stone
Volunteer Savannah Jones Beachy said she sees her work at the cemetery as exploring a piece of local history.
“I first started coming here to take my dog for walks,” Jones Beachy said. “And then I did a tombstone cleaning class and got hooked, and I come here now every weekend.”
When Jones Beachy is not out among the graves cleaning headstones, she works on the weekend to help digitize cemetery records. (An 1889 fire destroyed the cemetery’s first 32 years of records, so making the gravestones more legible will help the historical society learn about the people who are buried here.)
“I really enjoy getting to look up the facts about the people so they're not just a stone,” she said. “Sometimes these people's names haven’t been spoken in hundreds of years.”
Volunteering in the cemetery is also Jones Beachy’s way of engaging with people from the past.
“I like to talk to the person as I clean their stone,” she said. “Some people might find that creepy or weird, but I think it's just very endearing to know that people are still here caring about you, even when you left the world.”
For more information about gravestone cleaning classes next year, check Union Cemetery’s event calendar.
