HAMILTON COUNTY, Ohio — Across Ohio, cemeteries from the 1800s are falling into disrepair. 

As many of the gravestones fade away, a part of history goes with them. But there are efforts to make repairs and give the resting places new life. Outside Cincinnati, the historic Beech Grove Cemetery is getting a facelift thanks to some church volunteers and Springfield Township Public Works Department.

“We’ve done this for a couple years now,” said Jamie Rouff, a volunteer with the Northminster Presbyterian Church.

“We have been planting trees and we help with gravestone cleaning, making sure they’re upright and just really giving it some attention.”

That means a lot to relatives of those buried here:

“My great grandmother, Sadie Blankenship, she’s buried here,” said Monica Blankenship-Marette, the daughter of Reverend Norman Blankenship. “To see everybody come out to clean it up, doing the excavation, putting the stones back because preservation is important, especially in the African American Community.”

“It’s a Black cemetery where people were buried in a time where they didn’t have a lot of dignity in their lives,:” said Asja Bard, manager of program initiatives at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

Her team photographed the refurbished stones, and will do research on the people buried there.

“Once we start doing research, we can place names and give stories to people and give back that dignity and everyone was helping to lift up the structures and, in a way, lift up the people,” Bard said.

“The fact that they may have lived a difficult life and they’re here and they fell into disrepair and that we can restore that peace and give them the gravestone they deserve, it means a lot,” Rouff said.

“I think it shows in one way how far we’ve come as a country - we still have a long way to go but caring enough about people you’ll never meet and their resting space that’s really honorable and really loving,” Bard said.

Bard and the volunteers are hoping they end up with more help after all the media attention they’ve received over the past week.

“And hopefully, we’ll have more people come out, the more you put it out there for folks, to make sure that this place never, no pun intended, dies,” Blankenship-Marette said.