Community Project
For many families, military service is more than history. It is part of who they are.
It certainly is for mine.
Both of my grandfathers served in the military. My brother served. My uncle served. And today, my son is carrying that tradition forward as a member of the United States Air Force.
Because of them, military service has never felt distant or abstract to me. It has always had a face. A name. A family attached to it.
It represents birthdays missed, long days away from home, uncertainty, sacrifice, and the willingness to stand between the people we love and the dangers that threaten the freedoms we sometimes take for granted.
Some came home and continued building their lives.
Some carried the physical or emotional effects of their service for the rest of their lives.
And some gave everything.
We believe they deserve to be remembered.
Our Commitment: 100 Headstones by the End of 2027
The Hundred Headstone Project is LMB Headstone Care's commitment to donate our time, labor, materials, and resources to professionally clean and care for the headstones of 100 deceased United States service men and women by the end of 2027.
There is no charge to their families for the work performed as part of the project.
It is simply our way of saying:
Thank you.
Thank you for serving.
Thank you for sacrificing.
Thank you for protecting generations of Americans you would never meet.
And thank you for helping preserve the freedoms our families enjoy today.
We cannot repay that sacrifice.
But we can remember it.
And one small way we can do that is by making sure the final resting places of those who served are cared for with dignity.
A Headstone Is More Than Stone or Bronze
When people walk through an older cemetery, they may see rows of granite, marble, and bronze.
We see something different.
Every marker represents a person.
Someone's husband. Someone's wife. Someone's father or mother. Someone's grandfather or grandmother. Someone's brother, sister, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, or friend.
Behind every name carved into stone is an entire lifetime of experiences that cannot possibly fit between two dates.
For a veteran, that stone also represents something else.
Service.
A military emblem or inscription on a grave marker quietly tells visitors that the person resting there once raised a hand and agreed to serve this country.
Years of rain, snow, sunlight, dirt, biological growth, oxidation, and changing seasons can slowly obscure that memorial. Lettering becomes difficult to read. Bronze loses its richness. Stone darkens beneath years of staining and biological growth.
The person has not been forgotten.
But sometimes their memorial begins to look as though they have.
We want to change that.
Caring for Their Memorials the Right Way
The Hundred Headstone Project is not about rushing through cemeteries with a pressure washer.
It is about careful, respectful memorial preservation.
Different materials require different approaches.
Granite is not treated exactly like marble. Marble is not treated exactly like bronze. Older monuments may require considerably more caution than newer memorials.
Before beginning work, we examine the condition of the memorial and document its appearance. We use appropriate cleaning methods intended to remove unwanted biological growth and surface contamination without unnecessarily damaging the underlying material.
Bronze markers deserve particular attention.
Years of exposure can leave bronze looking dull, faded, oxidized, or uneven. After appropriate cleaning and evaluation, we can carefully treat the bronze and, when suitable, apply a special conservation-grade wax to enrich the appearance of the surface while providing a sacrificial protective barrier.
It is the type of careful approach used in professional conservation work: improve the appearance of the memorial without treating it like an ordinary piece of outdoor metal.
Our objective is not simply to make something look cleaner.
Our objective is to treat someone's memorial with the respect we would expect if the name on that marker belonged to someone in our own family.
Because to another family, it does.
Help Us Honor 100 American Service Members
Our goal is simple:
We hope the Hundred Headstone Project becomes more than a number.
We hope families will tell us about veterans whose memorials need attention.
We hope cemeteries will help us identify service members who may no longer have family nearby to care for their graves.
We hope veterans' organizations, churches, community groups, and ordinary citizens will help us find the men and women whose service deserves to be remembered.
Most importantly, we hope every restored name causes someone walking through that cemetery to stop for just a moment.
To read it. To notice the military designation. And perhaps to remember that the freedoms we inherited were protected by real people whose names now appear on those stones.
