If you’ve driven by Center Cemetery in New Ipswich on a weekday morning this summer, it’s possible you’ve seen people diligently scraping away at the paint on the cemetery’s fence.
Carl Toko and Jim Lawless have been hard at work for weeks, scraping away the flakes and chips of old paint that is splintering away from the fence. Now that most of the scraping is complete, they’ve started the process of repainting the fence, to make it look as good as new.
“I don’t think it’s been painted for quite some time,” Toko said. “It needs it badly.”
Toko said that this project began after the town’s cemetery sexton Ollie Niemi asked if he would be willing to work on repainting the fence. Toko had previously been doing cemetery maintenance, such as cutting brush and cleaning headstones. When he decided to take on the fence, he recruited Lawless to join him.
Now that they’re in the painting stage, they’ve asked Mitch Gluck to help them out. Lawless’s wife Betty also visits the worksite, in between her own work restoring and cleaning gravestones at another town cemetery.
“We look at is as redecorating a future home,” Gluck said of the painting process.
The hope, Toko said, is to be done with at least the road-facing front of the fence by the Children’s Fair on Aug. 21. He’s fairly sure that they’ll have all the painting done soon. It’s been quite an endeavor, according to Lawless, with an estimated 80 wooden panels to scrape and paint, front and back, and 400 feet to cover on both sides.
“It’s kind of a fun summer project, something to do during the day,” Toko said. It has been difficult to find good times to work on the fence, though, due to the unpredictably stormy weather so far this summer.
The work that they have completed has not gone unnoticed. Toko said that they’ve received compliments from townspeople.
“Some people have stopped by and said it looks nice,” he said. They’ve also received gifts from passersby – coffee and muffins once, and another time, lemonade.
“It’s had a great response from the people in town,” Toko said. “Everyone wants us to see it done.”
He said that he is especially glad to help improve the town in some way.
“It helps the town out, too,” he said. “It’s a way of giving back to the community.”
“Maybe it will encourage other people to donate their time to pick up and help the town look nice,” he added. “Eventually the whole town would be fixed up.”