Northville — Wearing work gloves and gripping a soft brush, David Marold of Northville kneeled down in front of a gravestone inside a Northville cemetery this past week and began to scrub the grave of someone he’d never met.
It didn’t matter. Marold is part of a team of volunteers who’ve been cleaning gravestones, many of them for veterans, in Northville and Northville Township, not just to preserve them, but to show respect for those who’ve gone before them.
This month, VFW Command Post 4012 and Northville’s Cemetery Renewal Task Force focused their efforts on the command post’s plot of Rural Hill Cemetery on the southeast corner of Seven Mile and Sheldon roads in Northville ahead of Memorial Day. The VFW’s plot contains the graves of 176 veterans, according to Marold, who heads the cemetery renewal task force.
“These are our ancestors that went before us in the town of Northville,” said Marold, who is a veteran himself and served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, in the early 1970s. “We all feel good doing this. And there’s no politics. It’s just fun, and you can see what you’re doing.”
The task force was formed in 2024 at the request of Northville Mayor Brian Turnbull in preparation for the city’s bicentennial in 2027.
Marold said many cemeteries went bankrupt during the Great Depression. And cities often don’t fund cemetery cleanup, which is why they rely on volunteers and donations.
Marold’s team of volunteers — he’s had up to 70 of them at one time, to be exact — is working to clean up and beautify Rural Hill, along with Oakwood Cemetery on Cady Street between Wing and First Streets in Northville. Rural Hill had 758 veterans’ graves as of December.
Marold said his team did a survey of 20 historic cemeteries, and Oakwood was one of the worst.
The team brushes dirt off the gravestones, cleans them with certain chemicals to whiten them and cleans the grounds around each grave. They also work with a preservationist to level the gravestones that need it.
“If they’re only 30 years old, they’re not too bad,” Marold said. “The older they are, the more work it is.”
While Marold’s team doesn’t just focus on veterans’ gravestones, the city’s Memorial Day parade led them to make a goal for themselves: Clean up the gravestones in Rural Hill along the city’s parade route. The parade route begins in downtown and ends at the cemetery, according to the city’s Chamber of Commerce.
“The ground is like clay and concrete, and most of their stones are leaned in or twisted,” preservationist David Carter said of the veterans’ gravestones in Rural Hill.
These efforts coincided with the goal of the VFW post, which is to bring its plot of gravestones “up to Arlington status” in 2026, said post commander Ed Huyck. It’s a reference to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the nation’s largest cemetery with about 400,000 veterans, which is maintained by a professional staff overseen by the U.S. Army.
Some of the gravestones in this Northville plot are along the parade route, Marold said.
“We have flagpoles, we have walkways, we have benches for visitors,” Huyck said. “It’s a hallowed site, and we maintain it out of respect for those who reside there.”
Huyck said Tuesday that the lawn cleanup of the VFW plot at Rural Hill is “99% complete,” save for mowing the grass and blowing leaves. He said the post’s preservation efforts have been funded through contributions to the tune of about $45,000.
What is required to clean the gravestones
Marold’s team of volunteers was at the cemetery Wednesday doing cleanup work. The volunteers split up into two teams, which Marold affectionately calls the Tombstone Gang and the Ground Gang.
The Tombstone Gang consisted of volunteers who focused on cleaning the gravestones, while the Ground Gang focused on the lawn and removing invasive species from the site.
The Tombstone Gang was at Rural Hill Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon.
While the task force works throughout the warmer months, for the past several weeks its members have focused exclusively on cleaning off veterans’ graves, as well as those tombstones that line the Memorial Day parade route.
The process is laborious. Many of the stones are more than a century old and haven’t been touched for decades.
The first step is removing the lichen, a greenish buildup of symbiotic algae and fungus that some might mistake for moss. This requires serious elbow grease with both a plastic scraper and a dry brush. Tombstones with a craggy finish are especially time-consuming compared with their smoother counterparts.
“Depending on the size of the stone, it could take 15 minutes; it could take half an hour,” said Chuck Murdock, 70, a Northville resident and a member of the Tombstone Gang.
Next, the gravestones are wetted with Orvus, a potent but biodegradable detergent originally formulated to clean livestock. That’s followed by good, old-fashioned soapy water and finally a rinse with clean water.
“We get soft brushes so we don’t damage anything. … We even use toothbrushes where the names are,” Murdock said.
On a good day with plenty of volunteers, the group might clean 75 or more stones. Since the task force was formed in 2024, its volunteers have collectively cleaned more than 600 stones.
Many of the volunteers are retirees, like Curt Perry, a longtime teacher in the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools district. Perry, 73, said he lives near the cemetery and has plenty of time on his hands, so it makes sense that he would help with the worthy effort.
Besides, he said, briefly scanning the cemetery, “My forever home will be here someday.”
“These people have put their hard-earned money into these monuments, and we’re just trying to do our part to keep them clean for as long as we can,” Perry said.
For Huyck, a U.S. Army veteran who served 18 months in the Vietnam War with the 1st Special Forces Group, beautifying the cemetery’s designated veterans’ section, with its dozens of uniform, white markers, is a personal mission.
Huyck led an effort that raised $45,000 so the VFW could trim trees, redo the walkway and fully replace the archway that welcomes visitors to the cemetery’s veterans’ section. His goal was to get it up to “its original Arlington level,” which he said has been a success.
On Wednesday, he took a short break from placing small, new American flags beside each veteran’s grave marker to express his appreciation for the Tombstone Gang.
“The demographic at VFWs has changed over the years, and we don’t have the manpower we had in the past, and sometimes the manpower we do have isn’t up to the task,” said Huyck, a former Detroit firefighter who retired as the department’s deputy chief. “(The task force) volunteered to do all the stones. They did Oakwood (Cemetery), and they’re absolutely beautiful. And they’re coming through Rural Hill, which has thousands of stones, most of them needing some kind of attention.”
Other cemetery preservation efforts
Carter, the preservationist, said Northville isn’t the only community that’s been working to improve the conditions of its cemeteries. Carter said he currently works with 20 municipalities, including his own in Commerce Township, on preservation efforts.
Carter said cemetery preservation is “very important” because of the histories of each community they’re in.
“All of these municipalities that are taking charge and wanting all of their cemeteries looking beautiful is a great thing,” Carter said.
mbryan@detroitnews.com
mreinhart@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Meet the Tombstone Gang who cleaned Northville graves before Memorial Day
Reporting by Max Bryan and Max Reinhart, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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