Heavy duty restoration

Toney River - When Alex MacKay first started working with the family business more than a decade ago, he admits he thought it was kind of silly.
He was washing gravestones by hand, using scrub brushes, water and elbow grease to return the monuments to their original conditions. Some, he says, were impossible to read the engravings. Others had toppled over and needed to be repaired or straightened.
Slowly, Alex says, he learned to appreciate the value of what he's doing.
"A lot of workmanship went into these stones, especially the old ones that are like statues," he said. "I take a lot of pride in those, when we clean them up and put them back."
Alex is the fourth generation of MacKay men to work in the family business, which his father, John, now operates, after his uncle, Don, retired.
The business began in 1896, after Alex's great-grandfather, Hector D. MacKay, took a stone-cutting course from a J. MacPherson in New Glasgow. He then started his own business making headstones in River John.
"We just finished straightening and cleaning some stones in the Union Centre Cemetery and noticed some were made by J. MacPherson," said John. "I couldn't help but wonder if my grandfather had worked on them, as the dates were from the same era."
His son, Hector D., took over the business in the 1920s and worked until he got sick in the early 1970s. His wife, Jean, was very active in the business as well.
"My mother would go around and get the names and usually do the talking and she always packed a lovely lunch for us," John recalled.
Don took over from there until last year, when John and Alex took charge. John's other son, Josh, also helps out from time to time with some of the very large, heavy stones, since the MacKay's don't use machines when they work in cemeteries.
"We've got a lot of tricks learned over the years - by my brother, father and grandfather before me - we get all the benefit from them," John said.
One of the problems they see at old cemeteries is the way that moss eats into the stone, damaging the colour and hiding the writing. When you clean it, if you're not careful you can easily take a piece of the stone with you.
They prefer to do things the old way - by hand - whether they're lifting a stone back on its base or cleaning a headstone.
While the alternative sandblasting would clean a stone in under an hour, it also causes damage to stones, John says, smoothing the edges of the lettering until they become hard to read.
On Friday, they were working in the Haliburton Cemetery in the Caribou area. John says he remembers his father working in the same cemetery.
"I was always drawn to the angel statue, right by the entrance," John said. "I loved the workmanship. Now that I have been doing some repair work and cleaning in this cemetery, I've been given the honour of cleaning the angel."
That's John and Alex's next project, and it should be a doozy. The angel monument was made in New Glasgow by King and dates back to 1884, when it was erected in memory of a seven-year-old girl. The name is so faded that it's hard to read, but it looks like it belonged to Ida, daughter of Rebekah and John McKenzie. Her mother, Rebekah, died just two and a half years later and is also marked by the stone.
The stone is intricately carved and likely took a full winter to complete, said John.
"It'll probably take me more than a day to clean," he said of the statue, that stretches far above his head. "I can hardly wait to start."