As Granite Staters lower flags this Memorial Day weekend and gather for parades from Berlin to Salem, one Windham librarian has set herself a quieter task. Erin Moulton has begun what she hopes will be a months-long restoration project at the town’s Cemetery on the Plains, cleaning and documenting 19th- and early 20th-century gravestones, including those of Civil War veterans whose markers have weathered to the point of being nearly unreadable. Her work, profiled this week by NHPR, is part service project, part historic preservation, and part argument that the names of New Hampshire’s earliest defenders should not vanish quietly into lichen and acid rain.

Moulton, a librarian and genealogist by training, said the urgency of the work is not abstract. Headstones from the Civil War era, particularly the marble obelisks and tablet markers that dominate New England burying grounds, are vulnerable to a combination of freeze-thaw cycles, biological growth, and chemical weathering. Many were carved more than 150 years ago in soft stone, and the inscriptions that once stood proud against the surface have been worn back to a faint impression. “Because these do fade and because the headstones break and sometimes will fall down and because they’re weathered and deteriorated over time, they can fade into being completely unreadable or they can be destroyed by weather conditions,” Moulton told NHPR.

A Cemetery Older Than the State Constitution

The Cemetery on the Plains sits in the historic core of Windham, a town that traces its roots to a 1722 land grant and was officially incorporated in 1742. Burying grounds like this one hold not only Civil War soldiers but earlier residents who fought in the Revolutionary War, served in town offices during the early decades of statehood, and worked the family farms that knit southern New Hampshire’s villages together. For genealogists, these stones are primary-source documents. For families, they are the most personal piece of public history New Hampshire offers.

What makes the Windham project different from a one-off cleanup day is its scope and intentionality. With permission from the cemetery’s trustees, Moulton plans to work in sections, using soft brushes and gravestone-specific cleaning solutions to lift away biological staining without damaging the marble or granite underneath. She hopes to finish cleaning a large section of the cemetery by early October, before winter weather makes the work impossible and the freeze-thaw cycle resumes its slow erosion of any newly exposed surfaces.

“It’s a service to the stone, the person who was there, and it’s a service to the public in the future as well,” Moulton said. “So that it’s still documented, still readable to the local historians and to the genealogists, to family members.”

Memorial Day, Reconsidered

Memorial Day was born after the Civil War as Decoration Day, when communities visited the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers to clean their resting places and lay flowers. The modern federal holiday, codified in 1971, expanded to honor all U.S. service members who died in the line of duty, but the underlying ritual of cemetery care never really left small New England towns. Volunteer veterans’ service organizations, American Legion posts, and historical societies still organize cleanups, flag placements, and reading-of-the-names ceremonies at burying grounds across New Hampshire.

What Moulton is adding to that tradition is a more deliberate, technical layer. Casual flag placement is one thing. Cleaning a stone the wrong way can cause permanent damage, and most well-meaning volunteers do not realize that household products like bleach, ammonia, or commercial degreasers can react with the carbonate minerals in marble and accelerate erosion. That is why Moulton spent time learning the work before lifting a brush.

For New Hampshire residents who want to honor veterans this Memorial Day without leaving the state, the annual fallen-officers memorial in Concord and the Gold Star license-plate program in the news this spring (covered in our piece on HB 1078, the Gold Star license plate bill) offer separate but related ways to participate.

How to Clean a Gravestone Without Doing Damage

Moulton offered a four-step framework that NHPR’s audience can use to volunteer this summer. The first step is getting to know your local cemetery. Many towns, including Windham, publish self-guided walking tours that identify the people buried there and the local stoneworkers who carved their markers. The Windham tour, part of the town’s 275th anniversary materials, includes notes on prominent families and the regional stoneworking traditions that produced many of the markers.

“I think there’s a lot to admire, both in terms of sculpture and workmanship,” Moulton said, “but also town history and appreciation for that, or at least curiosity.”

The second step is getting trained. The New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association and the Vermont Old Cemetery Association teach classes on gravestone care, including how to assess a stone’s condition before deciding whether to clean it at all. Moulton herself learned through one of these programs, and she emphasized that the cleaning agents used are conservation-grade products formulated to be safe for porous historic stone. “It’s conservation quality materials,” she said. “It’s not like I would clean it with dish soap or chlorine. That would be very bad.”

Local graveyard and cemetery associations in both states also run regular volunteer crews. Joining one of those weekend groups is the easiest way for a Granite Stater to learn the work safely, and it has the added benefit of connecting volunteers with experienced preservationists, town historians, and genealogists who know which graves matter most and which are most at risk.

The third step is permission. This part surprises a lot of people. Every headstone in a cemetery is the personal property of the person who bought it. “You wouldn’t just walk into a cemetery and assume you could clean a stone unless it’s your own family gravestone that you purchased,” Moulton said. “If you damage that and it’s somebody else’s stone, then you’re then responsible for damaging personal property, and there are laws governing that.” Moulton asked Windham’s cemetery trustees for written authorization before lifting a single brush and showed them documentation of her training.

The fourth, unwritten step is patience. Restoration is slow work. A single stone can take hours of intermittent cleaning across multiple visits as biological growth lifts and the natural surface re-emerges. A whole cemetery can take a generation. That is part of why Moulton frames her project as months-long: she is not racing to finish, she is committing to do it correctly.

Why This Matters for New Hampshire History

The state of New Hampshire holds roughly 30,000 known burial sites, ranging from large municipal cemeteries to small family burying grounds at the edges of long-abandoned farmsteads. Many are barely maintained. Some sit on land that has changed hands several times since the original deed was recorded and now rests inside a subdivision or a stretch of woods most neighbors never visit. When the inscriptions fade, the connection between a family name and a physical resting place can be lost permanently, even if the death record survives in town files or state archives.

That loss matters most acutely for Civil War veterans, whose markers tend to be older, softer, and more vulnerable than later granite headstones, and whose military service was often the most consequential thing about a New Hampshire farmer’s life in the 1860s. The New Hampshire Veterans’ Cemetery in Boscawen maintains many later veterans’ graves to a high standard, but the older country cemeteries where Civil War-era soldiers were buried alongside their families depend almost entirely on volunteer attention. Moulton’s project, and the broader push by groups like NHOGA, is filling a gap that the state itself is not staffed to close.

There is also a digital documentation piece that Moulton hopes to complete alongside the cleaning. Photographing each stone before and after a cleaning, recording inscription details, and uploading the results to public genealogical databases like Find a Grave and BillionGraves preserves a record even if the physical marker is later lost. For descendants searching for ancestors from the Granite State, that documentation can be the difference between a family tree branch that ends in mystery and one that ties back to a specific town meetinghouse and a specific regiment.

How Granite Staters Can Help

For New Hampshire residents who want to do more than place a flag this Memorial Day, Moulton’s project suggests a practical path. Look up the cemeteries in your own town. Ask the selectboard or cemetery trustees what shape they are in. Contact NHOGA about its next training. If the cemetery you care about is a private family plot, talk to the family. If it is municipal, talk to the trustees. Do not begin cleaning without permission, and do not begin cleaning without training.

The reward, Moulton said, is partly the artifact itself and partly the community that gathers around the work. Cleaning crews tend to attract genealogists, history buffs, retirees with time and patience, and younger volunteers who want a tangible connection to where they live. In a state whose history is uneven, contested, and easy to take for granted, the slow work of bringing a name back into legibility on a marble tablet is one of the more durable forms of civic participation Granite Staters have available to them.

That is part of why Memorial Day matters in a place like Windham. Not because parades and flags settle anything by themselves, but because they point people toward the cemeteries where the actual history lives. Moulton plans to keep working at the Cemetery on the Plains through the summer and into the fall, brush by brush. The Civil War veterans buried there fought to keep their country whole. Restoring their names is a small, stubborn act of return.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is leading the Windham gravestone restoration project?

Erin Moulton, a Windham librarian and genealogist, is leading the months-long restoration of 19th- and early 20th-century gravestones at the Cemetery on the Plains. She received permission from the cemetery's trustees and was trained by the New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association.

Can I clean a historic gravestone in my own town?

Not without permission and training. Each headstone is the personal property of the person who bought it, and damaging one can carry legal liability. The New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association and the Vermont Old Cemetery Association both offer training classes on safe cleaning methods.

What products are safe to use on a marble or granite gravestone?

Conservation-grade gravestone cleaning solutions and soft brushes. Household products like bleach, ammonia, and dish soap can react with the minerals in historic stone and accelerate erosion. Trained volunteers use only products formulated for porous historic markers.

How can I find Civil War veterans buried in New Hampshire?

Town historical societies, state archives, and online databases like Find a Grave and BillionGraves catalog known veteran burials. Many New Hampshire towns also maintain Civil War memorial lists at their public libraries and town halls.

Why is Memorial Day weekend the right time to start this kind of project?

Memorial Day grew out of post-Civil War Decoration Day traditions when communities gathered to clean veterans' graves and lay flowers. Spring weather makes the cleaning work feasible, and the holiday's emphasis on remembrance draws volunteers, families, and town officials into the cemeteries in numbers that make it easier to coordinate larger projects.

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