Volunteers work to make sure graves of Benedictine monks in St. Vincent cemetery are taken care of

LATROBE, Pa. — Hundreds of Benedictine monks are buried at the St. Vincent Cemetery next to the college campus. Until a few years ago, many of their graves sat in disarray.

“The cast iron crosses very simply deteriorated due to the combination of rust and wear and tear,” said Ed McCormick.

Three years ago, a retired administrator from the Latrobe School District worked to gather volunteers to help restore the crosses. McCormick is one of those volunteers.

“What we’ve been doing is grinding them down with electric brushes, very simply cleaning them up as best we can, putting a coat of primer on it, and then a protective black paint, a Rustoleum type product, to ensure they’re going to last a little bit longer,” McCormick said.

McCormick and other volunteers meet for an hour or two twice a week to do this work — and now, they’re almost done. They have just about 20 more to finish.

They didn’t think they’d ever get done.

“It’s like anything, you just take a little bit at a time, a little here, a little here, and it’s amazing how quickly things add up,” McCormick told Channel 11′s Andrew Havranek.

McCormick said the volunteers want to keep working on the graves. Two big projects — finding a way to restore the name plates — and removing the moss growth from the bases of the crosses — are being looked into.

“We don’t want to damage the work that we’ve done while we’re trying to clean up this,” he said.

McCormick said it’s their way to make sure these monks — and the five nuns buried at this cemetery — are never forgotten, as they gave so much to the school and community. It also makes the cemetery look nicer, too.

“People walking through their cemetery on their daily exercise often comment it looks so much better, looks so much nicer,” McCormick said. “That’s our goal, to leave things a little bit better than when we left it.”

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