Jim Davis isn’t your average caretaker. For almost three years, he’s been restoring gravestones dating back to the 1700s, giving them a fresh new look. He discussed his work and his journey on how he founded his business, Tidy Tombstones, with residents at the Moorestown Library on Oct. 6, giving insight into his unique job. His talk was part of the Historical Society of Moorestown’s New Jersey History Speaks Lecture Series.
“Some stones are just – as I call them – persnickety,” Davis said. “They have their own personalities. Some of them just don’t want to get clean. Some of them come out pristine, literally, as soon as you touch them.”
It all started with a school project that Davis’s granddaughter was assigned to do about her family’s ancestry. She was asked to give a brief presentation about where she came from. Davis, his granddaughter, and other family members discussed the birthplaces of parents, grandparents, great-, and great-great-grandparents, and they helped her make a chart of the family history. Working on that project raised a lot of questions about the family’s past for Davis, so he and his wife decided to join ancestry.com and build a family tree for his granddaughter so that she would always have her own little family tree. That experience was eye-opening for Davis, who found out about people that he never knew existed. Discovering where people from his past were buried led him to visit the gravesites of people who weren’t too far from his home. When he saw the condition of their 100-plus year-old gravesites, he knew he had to do something, and that’s how Tidy Tombstones was born.
The first step for Davis is to tap the stone. By doing so, the sound the stone makes tells Davis if it is solid or if it may need some repair. Next, he takes pictures of the stone. By taking some ‘before’ pictures, it gives Davis a point of reference as the stone is going through the cleaning process as to how much it has improved. With the stone dry, Davis completely sprays it with biocide (a disinfectant used to kill many disease-causing viruses, bacteria, fungi and other microbes, before they can cause harm). After allowing the biocide time to work, the entire stone gets a brush on the front, back and sides, using a soft brush to remove any excess dirt and grime.
Next, the stone gets a thorough rinsing with clean water. Once the stone has been rinsed clean, it needs time to dry completely. Once dry, Davis will spray the stone again with biocide. As the biocide breaks down the material embedded in the stone and attacks the natural stains that the stone has acquired over its history, rain and wind will slowly remove their traces. Davis will typically give the stone a month until he revisits it to determine what to do next. Throughout the whole process, Davis has gotten to know the person beneath the stone, and all that feeds into his relationship with the stone and their family history.
Don Smith is a member of the property committee at Trinity Episcopal Church in Moorestown. His goal is to make the whole grounds better than he found it. After seeing a lot of gravestones that were in poor condition, the committee started looking for somebody who did Tidy Tombstone type work. When the committee connected with Davis through an internet search, they knew he was the guy. There are more than 500 tombstones in the church’s graveyard, and Davis recently started restoring a few of them at a time.
“Anytime we do something that’s an improvement, I’m happy with that,” Smith said.
Davis’s home base is around the Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery County areas in Pennsylvania, but he’s always eager to connect with others around the country. He can be reached at (215) 378-8943 or at TidyTombstonesPA@gmail.com or www.TidyTombstones.com.
“I try to make sure that when I’m done, if the person underneath the stone was standing there looking at it, they should be impressed,” Davis said. “When you stand with someone and they’re in that space within their own mind where they’re remembering the person that’s under the stone, it’s nice.”
“I try to make sure that when I’m done, if the person underneath the stone was standing there looking at it, they should be impressed,” Davis said.
Jim Davis, founder of Tidy Tombstones, restores an old gravestone at Trinity Episcopal Church in Moorestown.
