This month, the Cemetery Preservation Program was live from New York…Texas! We had a blast hosting two headstone cleaning and repair workshops in Henderson County. First, we teamed up with our gracious hosts from the New York Baptist Church and the adjacent historic New York Cemetery. Then, we ended the week working on the peaceful grounds of Fincastle Cemetery with a team of volunteers and descendants.
New York Cemetery (pop. 870) is located about 1,500 miles south of New York City (pop. 8.4 million), but if you’re coming from the Dallas area, it's about 88 miles east on US-187. We hosted our largest workshop yet, with around 40 participants helping clean and re-level some of New York Cemetery’s oldest and fragile monuments. New York Baptist Church members and other attendees got to practice hands-on, Do No Harm cemetery preservation techniques on the headstones of Henderson County pioneers and religious leaders who helped build the settlement of New York.
Our Fincastle Cemetery workshop was held with the blessing of the late Square Walker (1931-2025), the cemetery’s longtime caretaker. Square graciously met with us to plan for the future preservation of the cemetery while always sharing his colorful stories of growing up in Fincastle. His passing brings the start of a new chapter for the care and maintenance of the cemetery, which our workshop proved will be led by a new generation of preservation-trained volunteers and descendants.
A new chapter also brings new technology, as workshop instructors Rusty Brenner and Dan Kieninger of Texas Cemetery Restoration began a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey on the cemetery grounds. Be sure to follow the Cemetery Preservation Program for updates on next year’s workshops, which are made possible with support from the Cemetery Preservation Education Program Fund of the Lana Hughes Nelson Endowment Fund for Cemetery Preservation.