Mullet on the Ground

Sarah Miller of FPAN and her new assistant, Ryan Harke, came over to show off Tolomato to some visiting cemetery representatives from other parts of Florida. But in the midst of our tour, we came across the unlikely sight of a dead mullet lying on the pathway under one of the giant oak trees! The unfortunate fish was still glistening with water, and furthermore, it hadn’t been there only a few minutes earlier when Ryan had walked up to the chapel. We realized immediately that it had to be a sign of our semi-resident osprey at work; clearly, we had distracted him at his lunch and he had dropped his prize.  This adds a whole new risk to the cemetery, that of being struck by a falling fish, which Ryan narrowly avoided!



Tolomato Cemetery is full of wildlife, most of it birds living in the oak trees. There is a large hawk that frequently turns up perched on a vault, and we have seen owls and, of course, our osprey. Another wonderful thing that Tolomato provides to St Augustine: a habitat for wildlife right in the midst of the city. Alas, I’m afraid it’s not so good for the fish.

Quik Clean and Stealth Opening

Since we didn’t open the cemetery last Saturday (a 3rd Saturday) because of horrible weather about an hour earlier, we decided to open yesterday.  This time, we combined preservation and historical tourism:  one group worked on cleaning or restoring different sites, while another group tended to the table at the entrance and welcomed visitors.

During the 2 hours we were open, we got about 75 visitors, all of them very happy to discover that the cemetery was open.  Tours were on an irregular, as-needed basis, but visitors also had more time to ask for an in-depth explanation of different aspects of the cemetery, and several of us spent more than 30 minutes each with different interested visitors.

Meanwhile, others labored as you see below, where Patti Kelbert (owner of Le Pavillon) takes a wire brush to one of the posts on the Hernandez enclosure.

Missing are photos of Bob Kennedy, carefully weeding every square centimeter of the Benet enclosure; Mary Jane Ballou helping Priscilla de la Cruz clean out the dreaded area behind the chapel; Louise Kennedy leading people around; Nick McAuliffe and Janet Jordan and Bob taking the truck out to pick up crushed shell for covering the enclosures that Priscilla de la Cruz weeded (see below). But that all happened, and it was a really nice day for all.

It was so much fun that we’ve decided that in the future, we’re going to combine preservation with interpretation, and we hope to get some people out to work on different things while others lead tours.  Or they can trade back and forth!

If you’re interested, get in touch (board@tolomatocemetery.com).

Home Repairs

Everybody – the hardworking TCPA volunteers and docents in particular – will be very happy to know that we got the gate fixed up today.  Steve from Brock Fence came out and rehung it with new hardware, straightened the barbed wire and the chain link, put in a drop post so we can close half of it at a time, and in general made it a functioning gate again.  No more will it take three people to get the gate closed after our Open Day!

Steve did a great job and this is going to be a big improvement.  We’re planning on replacing the entire gate, of course, but that’s a project that won’t happen overnight.  In the meantime, we’ll enjoy our “new” gate – which was probably first installed over 60 years ago, in the 1940s or 1950s.  So all things considered, it hasn’t done a bad job.

Below is the new drop bar and hook. This may not look very exciting, but if you’ve ever had to hold one half of the very heavy and crooked gate closed with your foot while attempting to capture the other part with the chain and padlock, you’ll appreciate how wonderful this is!

Preservation Madness!

We went wild at the cemetery this weekend! In the space of only 3 hours, a team of about 15 people restored a cast iron gate, cleaned innumerable markers, and stripped out all of the ugly, stone-destroying weeds that were threatening the health and well-being of the vaults and markers.

Below are some great photos taken by Nick McAuliffe:

Here we see  the Hernandez enclosure, missing the gate - which Matt Armstrong removed to make it easier to clean.

Nick discovered that the enclosure had a brick sill.

Matt shows the group how to work on the gate, which was very rusted and had actually been face down in the grass for many years.

We brushed it with wire brushes and cleaned off all the flakes, as you see Matt, his parents and Patti Kelbert doing here.

Matt then sprayed it with Rust Reformer, which reverts the rust process and gives it a smooth surface again.

Next was the primer coat. All the paints are oil-based. It’s time consuming because there are so many nooks and crannies.  But many hands make light work, including my hand on the bottom, wearing the keychain.

Then we applied the black top coats, as we see Moses Stzylerman, in his suitable skeleton outfit, doing in this photo.

Finally, we put it away to dry.  Rain was coming in, so we had to hurry. But we’ll hang it next week.

Meanwhile, the other volunteers powered up and swept through the cemetery.  Here Priscilla cleans an enclosure, aided by Mary Jane, Janet and Moses.  Way in the background are two new volunteers, Sharla Fenchel and her daughter, going off to work on the mysterious tomb of “T.H.” at the very southeast corner of the cemetery.  It’s never too late to be a new volunteer!  You learn on the job.

Louise and Bob Kennedy removed lichens and aggressive plant-life throughout the cemetery.

We close with a photo of Bob, managing to win the war (at least temporarily) on all of that ugly stuff that grows on top of the Sanchez vault.  Congratulations to everybody!  Way to go!

Legoland meets NOLA

The tireless Nick McAuliffe, TCPA Vice President, was in San Diego to visit his grandchildren a couple of weeks ago.  He and his wife, Cynthia, took the kids on the obligatory visit to Legoland, which is just north of San Diego, and found that it was displaying Lego models of several important cities, among them, New Orleans.

And with his unerring sense for finding cemeteries, lo and behold, he found the famous St. Louis Cemetery #1, Lego version, in an appropriate place in the miniature French Quarter of the Lego NOLA.  It even appears to feature a funeral procession heading down the street!

Nick relates that he checked the Paris reconstruction for signs of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, but had no luck...

Preservation at the Continental Divide

I'm in New Mexico right now, near the Continental Divide and far away from St Augustine and Tolomato. But never really far away - I was thinking about our upcoming preservation work day (July 27, lest you forget!) and about the cleaning of the headstones and inscriptions in particular.

These are always hard to manage. If you clean them too much, the inscriptions become illegible. If you scrub the too hard, they wear away. And if you don't do anything, lichens  and acid from tree run-off attack the stone and they flake off or the stone degrades and they disappear.

But our problems are nothing compared to El Morro National Monument, where they have inscriptions (in this case, "historic graffiti") dating back to 1605, from the time of the first Spanish expeditions through the Southwest.  Inscriptions continued during the following US period and both were frequently engraved next to pre-European petroglyphs left much earlier by the various Indian groups (the Pueblos and the Zuni).

"Morro" is the Spanish word for headlands or bluff (or the snout of an animal!), and describes this magnificent sandstone crag that rises 800 feet above the already nearly 8000 foot altitude of these mountains, not far from Gallup.  At the foot of the cliff is a pool of fresh water, run-off from the snows and rains of this area, which has apparently always attracted human beings in this barren, harsh environment. At the top of the crag was a pueblo, nearly inaccessible from below and thus secure, with residents descending from the peak to bring up water. After the time of the Indians, Spanish expeditions and then later US pioneers and military expeditions also stopped here.  Below are some Indians carvings, also known as petroglyphs.

All the different passers-by left their marks.  Juan de Oñate, explorer of the Southwest and the Pacific coast, left the first European inscription in 1605 as he returned from his search for  the "South Sea" (he reached the Gulf of California and the Pacific).  The inscription is below and records these facts in his own hand.  And behind him came many soldiers, friars, governors, and even the occasional bishop, all of whom stopped to inscribe their dates, their names and their missions.  I was particularly struck by the fact that many of them even engraved their "rubrica," that is, the distinctive flourish that Spaniards still use to authenticate the document as their own.  

To give you a sense of scale, in the photo below, I am pointing at the Oñate inscription and the petroglyph shown above.

When the US took over New Mexico as a territory in1847, US expeditions - either to fight or make treaties with the Indians - made their way last this point. In 1849, LT. J. H. Simpson and a military artist, R.H. Kern, returning from making a treaty with the Navajos, took it upon themselves to transcribe all the Spanish inscriptions.  Their record of their work, which they engraved on the north wall, is the first in English. It also contains a spelling error - "insciption" instead of "inscription," but stone is unforgiving and  at that point, correcting it would have been more trouble than it was worth.

Carving on the wall was halted in1906 when the National Parks system was established, and following that, various attempts were made to preserve or even improve the readability of the original graffiti. The reason that Oñate's words stand out so much is that in the 1920s, some of the older inscriptions were darkened with graphite (that would be a #2 pencil) and later some were filled with other substances. But in 1924, attempts were made to clean off some off the more modern inscriptions, considered of no historic value, by rubbing them out with a piece of sandstone. Unfortunately, some of the important inscriptions were erased,too, among them that left by the famous Archbishop Lamy, the subject of Willa Cather's work, Death Comes For the Archbishop

Currently, preservation consists mainly of protection. There's really no way to preserve a perishable material like stone forever. The fact that these have endured for 400 or more years is something to be grateful for, particularly now that we have the technology to record them and to recover earlier descriptions of them. And maybe that's really all that can be done, particularly because there are many things beyond our control in an outdoor environment, such as a cliff face - or a cemetery.  

In fact, I was not even able to see all of the inscriptions because just a few hours before my visit, a rock fall had closed part of the pathway and the rangers were still evaluating the damage done to the graffiti. There hadn't been a rockfall there for decades, but that is certainly no guarantee that it will never happen, and another rockfall was inevitable. And so are more in the future, some of which will no doubt damage or destroy these inscriptions.

Preservation is all important - but sometimes this doesn't mean preserving the actual item (which is it always possible or even never possible) but instead an accurate record, particularly now with the great techniques we have for doing this.

Preservation Day Coming Up July 27!

We’re getting ready for a nice, hard-working morning of preservation tasks on July 27 (9 a.m.-12 noon, hopefully before it gets too hot to work!).  We’re planning on tackling the metalwork again, this time on one of the prettiest features of the cemetery:  the gate to the Mary Hernandez enclosure, which features two lambs resting under a weeping willow tree.

Lambs and weeping willows appear frequently in 19th century cemetery art. There appear to be two birds, probably doves, in this gate as well, and doves were also a frequent feature.

As you can see, the metal is covered with rust and has gotten pitted.  But we can fix that! 

Below you see a piece of the metalwork on the Benet-Baya enclosure. It’s in an unrestored state:  pitted and covered with rust and concretions of rust.

Here’s an identical piece on another part of the enclosure, after careful wire-brushing, brushing, sealing with a rust reverser, and several coats of primer and paint:

It’s a time-consuming process, but the results are great and the treated pieces will be preserved for many years.  So come out on and join us on July 27 when we work on the Hernandez gate.  We also plan to rehang the gate, which as you have probably noticed, is simply propped in place on the ground.

No experience necessary!  We provide the materials, although you might want to bring your own work gloves and eye-protection.