The Princessville Cemetery sits quietly off the roadside on Princeton Pike, across from Lewisville Road, but most of its headstones and grave markers are faded and unreadable.
Armed with cleaning solution and some stiff brushes, a group of young people spent a warm Saturday afternoon spraying and scrubbing the headstones in an effort to “bring them back to life” – so to speak.
The Princessville Cemetery sits on land that was donated to a Methodist Episcopal church for a chapel, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1950. The cemetery was in use between 1846 and 1921.
Tradition has it that the congregation granted permission to African Americans from the Lewisville Road neighborhood to use some of the land as a cemetery. There are a few headstones that mark the graves of those African Americans, including some who served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.
But the cemetery has mostly languished since the last burial took place more than 100 years ago. Attempts have been made to clean and reset some headstones from time to time.
The latest effort to clean up the cemetery was suggested by Dana Maughan, who sits on the Lawrence Historical Society’s board of trustees.
Maughan said she read a post on social media about someone who specializes in grave repair and cleaning. She immediately thought of the Princessville Cemetery, and suggested it as a project.
The Junior Historians Club sponsored by the Lawrence Historical Society latched onto the idea. A handful of club members, along with some scouts from Boy Scout Troop 28, gathered at the cemetery on April 20 to tackle the cleanup project.
The volunteer clean-up crews sprayed a special chemical on the headstones to remove the moss on them. After a few minutes, they began scraping away the moss lightly in a circular motion with a brush and then rinsed off the headstones.
As if by magic, details carved into the headstones emerged. Some were engraved with the phrase “In memory of…..” Another one had a lamb carved on it to depict that a child was buried there.
Many headstones listed the name, the person’s date of birth and their date of death. Others listed the number of years, months and days that the person had lived – 68 years, five months and seven days, for example.
It was a revelation for the students.
“I looked at one gravestone. There were the names of three children on it. It had a lamb carved on it to show that a child was buried there,” said Nate Kunkel, a member of the Junior Historians Club at Lawrence High School.
“Life expectancy was very low. Cleaning up the headstones, in my mind, gives them a second life (that is) prolonged through the ability to see the headstones long after they have passed away.”
Joseph Ciccone, president of the Lawrence Historical Society’s board of trustees, described the Princessville Cemetery as an orphan cemetery. There is no organization dedicated to its care and maintenance, he said.
Ciccone said he felt it was especially important to maintain the cemetery because there are military veterans buried there. A small American flag marks the grave of each military veteran.
“It’s part of our civic duty. It is something that we, as the Lawrence Historical Society, could do. Because there are Civil War veterans buried there, we felt it was our civic duty to see that the graves are tended to,” he said.
