Two partner to restore square fixture
The veterans monument on the Ellijay town square has a new shine after some recent work was done by employees of two area funeral homes.
Michael Smith, who’s long worked as a funeral director for Logan Funeral Home in Ellijay, started attending to the marble monument shortly before last Veterans Day.
Smith said he enjoys making older marble and granite stones look new again, and was thrilled when the City of Ellijay contacted him to see about getting the monument cleaned.
“It’s one of the largest monuments I’ve ever cleaned. It took a ladder and plenty of scrubbing to complete the job,” he said.
Smith used to get a lot of calls at the funeral home from people wanting to know how to clean their family members’ headstones, particularly during the summer church homecoming season. He eventually learned how to properly clean marble and granite stones, then started offering the service on his own about six years ago.
“I generally clean over 200 stones every year across north Georgia, and I work closely with Neal & Whitener Monument Company in Blue Ridge and Dawsonville Monuments in Dawsonville. I’ve done (cleaning) from all the way down in Milton to up in North Carolina to over in Dalton and as far east as Cornelia,” he said.
The veterans monument has stood on the Ellijay square since 1980. According to a June 1980 Times-Courier article, it was financed by Gilmer Historical Committee members, who raised funds by selling copies of a book by local historian G.G. Ward.
It took “the labor of a local impromptu monument setting” team that “combined brawn and engineering” to place the 10-foot, several-ton monument on the square, that article also tells.
The tree-flanked monument had accumulated mold, which was taken away by Smith’s work. The cleaning process took several applications and included pressure rinsing and scrubbing with a specialized chemical to remove the built-up mold, he noted.
“Marble is a more porous stone than granite, and it tends to absorb a mold-type substance that comes off of trees,” Smith said. “There’s a couple of ways that marble can be taken care of. It can be cleaned the way I do it, or it can be sandblasted, which is more expensive and probably would have been harder to do on the square.”
Smith was assisted in the restoration by Thomas Roper, of Jasper’s Roper Funeral Home.
Roper repainted the black lettering on the monument, which had aged and faded over the years. The inscription reads: “Dedicated in honor of those from Gilmer County who served honorably in the service of our country.”
“That’s pretty time-consuming and tedious work. He does great work and has assisted me on several different jobs,” Smith said about the letter repainting.
City councilman Kevin Pritchett expressed appreciation for the two’s efforts.
“We wouldn’t be able to enjoy the freedoms that we enjoy if not for the sacrifices our veterans have made. The monument is in the center of our city as a reminder of their sacrifices,” he added.