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nnovative has much more to offer than just our technology and business expertise. We proved that last Thursday when our team put their blood, sweat, and hopefully not too many tears into cleaning 103 historic gravestones for the Sharpsburg Historical Society during United Way of Washington County's Day of Caring.
We learned a lot about cemetery preservation and were assisted and trained on proper stone cleaning techniques by Robert Mosko and his crew from Mosko Cemetery and Monument Services. Here, Robert gives us a demonstration of how to properly clean a gravestone with just water and a scrub brush.
As Washington County's largest volunteer effort, we were part of more than 1,8000 volunteers working on nearly 150 projects for 45 nonprofits throughout the county.
Dirt and biological growth on the gravestones make the inscriptions difficult to see. Uncovering and documenting the inscriptions was a big part of the project as well.
Tom cleans while Bill transcribes the newly uncovered inscriptions.Many of the stones included an image symbolizing a welcome into Heaven or farewell from Earth. They also included popular poems or quotes from the time. These longer inscriptions were difficult to read, but Kayla helped document them by Googling the most legible phrases to piece together the entire quote.
Kayla works on transcribing some of the longer inscriptions.Our team really enjoyed the opportunity to get out of the office and work together doing something different.
Kris and Emmy
Team Innovative hard at work.It was especially cool to see the difference in the stones when we were done. We used 25 gallons of water on the stones and saved the Sharpsburg Historical Society up to $5,000 in labor costs to clean the stones.
Thanks so much to the United Way of Washington County for coordinating a successful day of service for our community.
