Protecting Grave Markers: A Turf Care Guide for Historic Cemeteries

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Caring for the grass in a historic cemetery is a problem of its own, because turf and grave markers meet everywhere. Turf care can damage markers in three ways:

physically, through mowing and trimming equipment;
chemically, through pesticides and fertilizers;
through irrigation: its layout, how it is used, and the quality of the water.

The project

This National Park Service project set out to produce a turf management guide for historic cemeteries. The team planned to review existing documentation and management practices and write a manual for turf care that protects cemetery monuments. The work would also point out gaps in what is known, to steer further research into turf care.

The lessons reach beyond cemeteries. Wherever monuments and buildings meet turf, and in any cultural landscape where stone or other building materials touch grass, science-based practices of this kind can shape maintenance plans.

The team

Bob Page directs the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, which he had led for twenty-one years when the project page was written. He oversees a landscape preservation program covering research, planning, stewardship and education, and technology development, with eight professional staff and an annual budget of $1.7 million. Before that he spent ten years as program manager of the NPS Cultural Landscapes Program in Washington, DC, helping develop policies, programs and standards for managing cultural landscapes in the national park system. He is a graduate of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and was made a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2007.

Michael Stachowicz is Program Manager at the Olmsted Center, with thirty years of turf experience in the private sector and the Park Service. Stachowicz has improved the Park Service's landscape maintenance through training, research, new technologies and contract management. Stachowicz's first Park Service job was managing the reconstruction of the National Mall, a $44 million project to make the Mall's turf more reliable and sustainable, which included an Operations and Maintenance Guide for the Mall and public education about the new approach. Stachowicz holds a degree in Plant and Soil Sciences from the University of Massachusetts.

Dennis Montagna manages the Park Service's Monument Research & Preservation Program, based at the Northeast Region Office in Philadelphia. The program helps managers of park sites, and others nationwide, interpret and care for historic cemeteries, outdoor sculpture and public monuments.

Conservation work: preservation planning and conservation for sculpture collections at the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battlefields, the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and Keweenaw NHP; training projects at cemeteries including Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and The Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; planning the conservation response to the 2017 vandalism at Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia; and advising Arlington National Cemetery on conserving the Tomb of the Unknowns.
New memorials: chairing the federal panel that chose the design for the African Burial Ground Memorial in lower Manhattan, where thousands of enslaved and free Africans were buried; designing, with sculptor Jim Barnhill, the memorial at Booker T. Washington's birthplace near Roanoke, Virginia; and, since 2014, writing and designing the bronze plaques given to National Historic Landmark stewards.
Training and service: a BA in Studio Art from Florida State University, a master's in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD from the University of Delaware; the 1989 ICCROM Architectural Conservation Course in Rome, on grants from the Kress and Getty Foundations, where he later returned as an instructor; former chair of the American Institute for Conservation's Architecture Specialty Group; adviser to the national Save Outdoor Sculpture! project; board member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, which gave him its Harriette Merrifield Forbes Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Gravestone Studies in 2018.