Grave Cleaning & Headstone Restoration in Shreveport

Cleaning Pine Sap and Red River Clay in Shreveport

Shreveport is different. Down south, you fight the swamp water. Here, you fight the pines. If you walk through Forest Park or Oakland Cemetery, you see it immediately. The trees are huge, and they drop sap on everything. It hits the headstones and makes a mess that is incredibly hard to clean.

Then you have the soil. The Red River mud is heavy and full of iron. When a storm rolls through, that red dirt splashes up on the granite. If it sits there, it leaves a rusty orange ring that soap just won't touch. Families searching for headstone cleaning services near me call us to scrape off that hardened pine sap or to draw those deep orange clay stains out of the stone.

Hardened Pine Sap

If you have a family plot under a pine tree in Shreveport, you know the struggle. The sap drips down and lands on the marker. The Louisiana sun cooks it until it is hard as a rock. It turns white and looks like a plastic bead stuck to the granite.

You can't just scrape these off. They hold on tight, and a scraper will scratch the polish. We use a cleaner that melts the bead down. It makes the sap gooey again so we can wipe it off with a rag. The stone underneath stays smooth and clean.

Red Clay Staining

The Red River mud stains everything it touches. When that heavy clay splashes onto a white marble headstone or a grey granite base, the color sinks right in. It leaves a deep, rusty orange mark that looks terrible against the clean stone.

A pressure washer won't get this out. The iron is deep in the rock. We use a clay poultice. We pack it onto the stained area. As it dries, it pulls the iron particles out of the stone. It takes time, but it gets the orange out without burning the stone with acid.

Sooty Mold and Crepe Myrtles

Shreveport is full of Crepe Myrtles. They look nice, but they attract aphids. The insects drop a sticky residue called "honeydew" onto the headstones below. That residue feeds a black fungus called sooty mold.

This stuff turns a headstone pitch black. It looks like someone sprayed it with soot. We treat this with a biological cleaner that kills the fungus and cuts through the insect residue. The stone turns bright again, and the cleaner keeps the mold away for a good while.

Leaning Stones in Forest Park

The terrain here isn't flat. Forest Park and Greenwood have rolling hills. The ground here is active. It gets soggy and expands, then cracks open when it gets dry. That movement shoves the stones around. They start leaning over because the ground won't stay still.

We fix this by digging out the foundation. We level the ground and pack it with crushed rock. The jagged rock locks together and holds the weight of the stone, so it doesn't slide when the clay gets wet again.

Service Costs in Shreveport

Cleaning hardened pine sap is tedious work. Pulling iron stains out of marble takes expensive materials. I can't give you a fair price over the phone. We have an online tool that helps. You pick the cemetery, tell us if you are dealing with sap, clay, or sinking, and you get a clear price instantly.