Stone Care Across the River
Auburn sits on hills overlooking the Androscoggin. The ground is heavy clay and rocks. It holds water. Frozen clay crushes foundations.
Go to Mount Auburn or Oak Hill. You’ll see stones hanging off the hillsides. Winter clay swells up and shoves them crooked. We also deal with the industrial soot from the old shoe factories. It formed hard black crusts on the granite. Families searching for headstone cleaning services near me call us to stabilize these sliding markers and strip off the historic grime.
Slope Creep and Sliding
Many of Auburn’s oldest graves are on steep inclines. Gravity pulls. Frost pushes. The stone creeps downhill a little more every freeze.
We see markers that have slid three feet from their base. Eventually, they tip forward. We have to take the monument apart. We dig a new, level bench into the slope. We fill it with crushed angular stone to lock it in place. Gravity can't pull it down if the base is locked in.
Clay Soil Frost Heave
The soil here is full of clay. Clay traps water. When the temperature drops to twenty below, that wet clay swells.
It jacks up the headstone base. It lifts one corner until the whole thing dumps over. We fix this by removing the clay. We dig a deep pit—below the four-foot frost line—and fill it with clean gravel. Gravel drains the water. Dry ground doesn't heave.
Shoe Factory Soot
Auburn was the shoe manufacturing capital. The factories burned coal. That greasy, sulfur-rich smoke settled on the stones for decades.
It formed a black gypsum crust that is harder than the stone. You cannot scrub it off. We apply a chemical poultice that digests the gypsum. It turns the hard crust into a soft paste. We rinse it off, revealing the clean stone underneath without scratching the surface.
River Valley Algae
The Androscoggin River keeps the valley damp. This wet air encourages green algae and black biological growth on the north side of stones.
Algae holds moisture against the stone, which accelerates frost damage. We treat it with a liquid biocide. This soaks into the stone pores and kills the root system. The algae dies and flakes off. The stone is finally clean.
Granite Spalling
Even granite fails. Water gets into the hairline cracks. When it freezes, it pops small flakes off the surface.
We see this on older, rough-cut bases. The stone starts to look rounded and worn. We apply a consolidant to weak areas to bond the crystals back together. It doesn't fix the missing pieces, but it stops the stone from shedding more layers.
Iron Jacking
The old masons used iron pins to stack the massive family monuments in Mount Auburn. Moisture gets into the seams. The iron rusts and swells up.
That internal pressure cracks the granite. We see top stones pushed right off their centers. We hoist the pieces apart. We drill out the bad iron and set new stainless steel pins. Stainless doesn't rust, so the joint holds tight forever.
Sunken Corner Posts
Family plots here often have granite corner posts (bounds). In the soft spring clay, these heavy blocks sink.
They eventually disappear under the grass. We locate them with probes. We dig them up, pack the hole with gravel to support the weight, and reset them so they are visible again. This re-establishes the boundaries of the family lot.
Service Costs in Auburn
Working on a steep, frozen slope is difficult. Resetting a monument that has slid downhill takes heavy equipment. We need to assess the site conditions and the weight of the stone before providing a quote.
- Slope Stabilization: Resetting sliding monuments on hills.
- Carbon Removal: Cleaning industrial soot from shoe factories.
- Frost Repair: Deep gravel foundations for clay soil.
- Biological Cleaning: Removing river algae and moss.
