I went to Spring Valley Cemetery which is on the former Fort Benjamin Harrison Army Post in Lawrence, Indiana and took some photos. I thought that one would be easier to complete during the challenge than my regular go-to cemetery that has 75,000 graves to photograph.
At Spring Valley, I was able to take about 40 photos before I ran out of memory on my camera - need to plan that better - but I ran into a different problem that slowed me down considerably. Unfortunately, since the Post was shut down some years ago, I think the maintenance on the Post facilities (like the cemetery) has declined. There are a number of issue that had to be dealt with in order to photograph the stones. Things like tall weeds growing directly in front of the stones, dirt creeping in on top of the horizontal stones, stones with no inscription, and sadly, broken stones. I was able to stop, pull weeds, and dig out some of the sunken stones so that they could be photographed, but it took quite a bit of time without tools. Digging by hand is messy and even then, there was a film of dirt left on top of the stone that was sad to photograph. I may try to spend a bit more time up there with the proper equipment and retake some of these photos, as it's clear that the cemetery is in need of some attention. Even a rag and a bit of water would have been very helpful to clean them up a bit. And a small hand trowel would have been nice to help push the dirt off the edges of the stones. Oh well - I'll be better prepared next time.
