Last fall, when Ray Troyer was looking for something to do in his retirement after 30 years as a home-builder, his first idea was to be a grave-digger.

“I didn’t want to sit around and do nothing, so when somebody suggested maybe I could dig graves, I went to a funeral home director I knew here in Macon to see if he had any grave-digging work,” said Troyer, 73. “He told me he had a guy he liked so I said fine. But as I was walking out the door, he said, ‘You know, I get calls all the time from people looking to clean headstones and set them back up when they’ve fallen over. Maybe you could do that.’”

Troyer went home and Googled “headstone cleaning.”

“I saw there was a business out there doing that and there didn’t seem to be anybody around here doing that kind of work,” Troyer said. “I saw the kind of equipment they used to set the headstones back up, jacks and hoists. I like making things, so I made my own equipment and got started in February.”

Troyer estimates he has cleaned about 150 headstones since then and has reset about half of those.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” he said. “I just wanted a little something to help our retirement income. It’s gotten to be way more than I ever dreamt.”

Troyer said cleaning a headstone is a pretty simple process.

“The key thing is the chemical solvent I use,” he said. “It’s a special chemical designed just for that purpose. You put it on the stone, let it sit for 10 or 15 minutes then scrub it with a brush. I have a 30-gallon water tank with an electric pump that I use to rinse off the stone after that. The great thing is that the chemical keeps working for days and days after you apply it. The stains just fall off and the next thing you know, they look brand new.”

Aside from the signage on his pick-up truck “R&M Headstone Restorations,” his only advertising is the work itself, which has proven to be very effective.

“People see a headstone I’ve cleaned next to one that’s been out there for years and has never been cleaned and they track me down,” he said. “Peggy Philips (the Lowndes County Justice Court Judge) is in charge of a cemetery in Crawford. She hired me to clean five headstones there. Now, just about every time they have a funeral, Peggy is calling me saying, ‘Do five more.’ Then there’s another funeral and it’s ‘do five more.’”

Most of his work comes from families who want their loved ones’ stones cleaned, sometimes a single stone, sometimes stones of multiple family members.

His biggest job is cleaning 500 stones in a cemetery in Ackerman, a job he has until May to complete. He has also cleaned stones in Crawford, West Point and Lowndes County in addition to the stones he has cleaned in Macon.

Troyer said it takes about an hour to clean a headstone. Headstones that have fallen or have broken can take several hours to repair, reset and clean.

“What happens a lot of the time is that the stones are set too close to the grave,” Troyer said. “When the grave settles, the stone leans and finally topples over.”

He uses a special epoxy to repair the broken stones then resets the stone using his homemade jacks and hoists. He uses crushed limestone placed under the stone to make it level.

Troyer said he’s not interested in building the business to where it’s anything resembling a full-time job.

“In this weather, I only work an hour or two a day. My wife (Marty) helps me when she can and sometimes my son-in-law will help if he has a day off every now and then. But mostly it’s just me. That’s what I like about this work. When you’re a home-builder you have to get after it every day, no matter the weather. I just got worn down and wore out. This is different. I don’t have to be out there working all the time.

“The only real schedule I have is for those 500 stones in Ackerman, but since I have until May to finish it, I can take it slow during this heat. I can do more as the weather gets cooler.”

Troyer and Marty have three children and nine grandchildren.

“Maybe one of those grandkids will take over this down the road,” Troyer said. “There’s no telling how much work you could get if you wanted to do this full-time. It could be a pretty good deal, I’m thinking.”

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].