The stones in the oldest corners of New Jersey and Pennsylvania graveyards have been leaning for a very long time. Rain gets into the seams, freezes, expands, and shoves the marble a fraction of an inch at a time. After a century or two of that slow hydraulic work, a headstone that once stood straight over a burial will crack in half or topple face-down into the turf. Most people walk past and assume vandals did it. Jim Davis knows better. "In most cases vandalism's not to blame," he told the Bucks County Adventures blog. "It's weather."
Davis is the founder of Tidy Tombstones, a one-man operation devoted to the restoration of historic cemeteries and the repair of gravestones dating back to the 1700s and 1800s. On the evening of Tuesday, October 6, 2026, he will bring that work to Moorestown, where he will speak at the Moorestown Library as part of the Historical Society of Moorestown's New Jersey History Speaks lecture series. The talk runs from 7 to 8 p.m. in Meeting Rooms A and B at 111 W 2nd St. Admission is free.
The subject is narrower than it sounds and stranger than most people expect. According to the library's event listing, Davis has become an expert not only on the physical repair of gravestones but on how cemeteries and grave markers have been viewed by different cultures at different times. That is a historian's angle on a craftsman's job, and it is the kind of thing that tends to fill a room in a town like Moorestown, which has been holding onto its own old stones for centuries.
Davis's path into the work was accidental. According to the Bucks County Adventures profile, it began when his granddaughter Aubrey, then a second-grader, was assigned a family ancestry project at school. The Davis family gathered to build a family tree for her to present to the class, and the exercise raised more questions than it answered. They joined Ancestry.com to give Aubrey a more detailed picture of where the family came from. One thing led to another, and Davis found himself in cemeteries, reading the inscriptions of people he had never met.
What he found there became a vocation. He is based in the Glen Ashton section of Bensalem, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and his restorations have spread across the region. He is a familiar figure to the Bensalem Historical Society, where he is known to call his friend Sally Sondesky with unbridled enthusiasm when something memorable surfaces from under two centuries of grime. "Sally, you can't believe what I just found!" he'll exclaim, his voice pitched higher.
The work is slow. A single marker can take months. The reward is the moment when an epitaph that had been unreadable for generations comes back into view, and the stone returns to something like the pearly white it must have had on the day of the burial, as much as 300 years ago. Algae discoloration washes away. Carved messages reappear. For Davis, the appeal is partly genealogical and partly something closer to resurrection: the dead left messages in marble and granite, and the weather has been erasing them.
He is also, by his own account, a believer in the power of divining rods to locate unmarked graves. He holds two brass rods fitted with insulating hand collars so that they can swing independently while he walks. Striding across a suspected gravesite, the rods begin to move. It is an unusual tool for a preservationist, but it speaks to the practical problem that faces anyone trying to care for an old burying ground: many of the people interred there were never given a marker at all, and the only way to protect a grave is to know where it is.
Davis's work has taken him to some of the region's most historically loaded ground. He has restored graveyards at historic churches in Bensalem, including work at a site the Bucks County Courier Times described as a uniquely historic Bensalem church, where he spent a month applying his skills to return the burying ground to what the paper called its former alabaster grandeur. That corner of Bucks County holds some of the oldest Black religious history in Pennsylvania. The Little Jerusalem AME Church, established in 1818 by freed slaves and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, kept a cemetery beside its sanctuary for freed people and Black Civil War veterans. Congregations like that one, and the small family plots that dot the countryside around them, are exactly the kind of places where a century of freeze-and-thaw can quietly erase a community's record of itself.
That is the case Davis will make in Moorestown. The Historical Society of Moorestown has been running the New Jersey History Speaks series as a partnership with the township library, and the lectures are free and open to the public. The series typically opens with a brief business meeting of the society before the speaker takes the floor. The society's upcoming slate also includes a November talk by author Dorothy Robbins Talavera on the Allinson brothers of Burlington County, Quaker sons who went to war, drawn from letters their family preserved. But the October evening belongs to the stones.
For anyone who has ever stopped in an old cemetery and wondered who was buried under a slab that has sunk below the grass line, or why a row of markers leans like a set of crooked teeth, the hour offers an answer that is part geology, part chemistry, and part stubbornness. The stones are not beyond saving. They are just waiting for someone with the patience to lift them, clean them, and set them right. Davis has been doing it one marker at a time, and on a Tuesday night in October he will explain how.