Cobb tackles monumental task of restoring historic cemetery

One day a week, Dick Cobb makes the drive from Raleigh to Mount Olive to work in the town’s historic cemetery. He doesn’t get paid for his time or labor or reimbursed for his expenses. He volunteers, he says, because “everybody needs an advocate, and I’m the advocate for the cemetery.” Of course, there’s a little more to the story than that.

Cobb was born and raised in Mount Olive but moved away in 1968 upon graduating from high school. He is now retired from a career in sales and marketing and lives in Raleigh. In 2017, he decided to return to his hometown to visit his grandparents’ graves in the historic Myrtle Grove section of Maplewood Cemetery. He wasn’t prepared for what he found.

Time takes a toll on a cemetery, especially one whose oldest graves date back to 1870. Back then, people were buried in pine boxes that deteriorated over time, causing the ground above them to sink, and tombstones to lean and sometimes fall. Trees grow, their lower limbs branching out and enshrouding nearby gravesites; mold blackens stones; and lawn mowers chip off corners. But, to Cobb, the biggest affront was the vandalism.

He remembers the cemetery being “vandalized severely” in 1970; at that time, he was just two years gone so he was still keeping up with local news. He says he later learned that it was vandalized again in the early 1980s and a third time, around 1999. The latest act of vandalism came this year, in August.

The thing about vandalism, Cobb says, is that the tombstones “are never ‘just’ knocked over. One piece is over here, one piece is over there.”

What’s more, tombstones that were knocked off their bases and broken apart in 1970 are often no longer even visible, having been covered by five decades of dirt. “You’ll put a shovel down, you’ll hear something go ‘clink,’ you get to digging, and you’ll say, ‘Well, my gosh, here’s the other piece of it,’” says Cobb.

Cobbs’ grandparents’ tombstone had not been vandalized, but it was darkened with mold, limbs from a nearby fir tree blanketed the gravesite, and a close-by tombstone was overturned. So he sawed off the bottom limbs of the tree, cleaned the headstone, and lifted the nearby fallen stone and tried to secure it with bricks underneath. This is where it became a good news/bad news story. The good news was that Cobbs’ grandparents’ gravesite looked much better; the bad news was that, by comparison, it drew attention to the work that needed to be done in the rest of the cemetery.

So, he kept returning, even though, he says, he initially had no idea what to do with the broken, blackened tombstones. “I didn’t know how to glue ‘em. I didn’t know how to clean ‘em, and nobody I knew, knew how.” He taught himself by going to the aisles of Lowes and Home Depot and reading product labels. Eventually, he found two products that he’s come to rely on: a fast-acting glue, Loctite 8X PL; and a slow-acting cleaner, Wet & Forget (although it takes weeks to months for the cleaner to do its job, it requires no scrubbing and leaves the stones looking like new).

In the years since he started doing this, Cobb has lost track of how many sunken graves he has filled, how many tombstones he has cleaned, straightened, repaired and re-erected. “I didn’t come out here with a plan,” he says. “I had no vision of doing anything.” He almost always works alone, although on one or two occasions, when re-positioning particularly large, heavy stones, town workers have assisted.

As to what keeps him coming back, year after year, Cobb references the town’s history. Although Mount Olive was chartered in 1870, he points out that people had been living in the rural community for decades before, raising families, starting churches, building schools and running businesses. “They started doing the things that make a town come together,” Cobb says. “Those guys are buried right here. If they hadn’t made those commitments, the town of Mount Olive wouldn’t be here.”

Cobb says that without an effort to properly maintain the cemetery, “you’ll lose the identity of all the people you should honor and respect that came before you, the founding fathers of this town.”

The business of maintaining the cemetery is particularly challenging because of this: plots are deeded out to a family as a piece of property, says the town’s cemetery director, Justin Hill, and those families are responsible for the upkeep of the headstones and footstones. But, as Cobb points out, the graves in Myrtle Grove date from approximately 1870 to approximately 1925, therefore many of the men and women buried here no longer have descendants living in the area, leaving their graves in a no-man’s land with regard to responsibility.

Hill says the town has a volunteer committee that gets together once or twice a year to do a big clean-up of the town’s cemeteries, and he says that although he has never repaired any broken stones himself, he has re-erected several that had fallen over. He readily admits that he is in awe of the work Cobb does. “He’s very, very talented,” Hill says. “He does it all. He’s smart, a genius. I can’t say enough about him.”

Cobb wonders what will happen when he’s no longer able to do the work. “I’m 72 years old,” he says. “My runway’s getting short real quick.” Ideally, he would like to be training several people — now — to continue the work he’s started. Some jobs, like lifting and moving tombstones that can weigh hundreds of pounds, require strength and stamina. Other jobs, like spraying cleaning solution, are not physically demanding. But so far, he says, no one is stepping forward.

The implication is sobering. “It may be like a bucket of water, where you stick your finger in and it makes a ripple, and in just a few seconds it’s as if you never did it; that may be all I do here,” says Cobb. And with that, he gets back in his truck and heads home to Raleigh.

The Myrtle Grove section of Maplewood Cemetery is located at the corner of James and Jefferson streets. Directly across from it is the Oak View section, with gravesites ranging from about 1920 to about 1980. Cobb volunteers in the Oak View section, as well.