Legionnaire leading effort to clean up military memorial markers in local cemetery.

When Massachusetts Legionnaire Jim Hall visited the gravesite of his father, World War II Army veteran Delmar Hall, a year ago at St. Mary of the Assumption Cemetery, he noticed the military memorial plaque at the foot of the grave had been displaced and overgrown with vegetation.

That prompted Hall, the vice commander of American Legion Post 236 in Haydenville, to clean up his father’s grave. But he didn’t stop there.

Hall started the “Raise Up Our Veterans” initiative that has brought community members together to start cleaning up the veterans’ gravesites. A recent effort saw more than 10 volunteers, including Hall, making sure the military plaques are in plain view.

“Back in the old days they used to place the brass plaques at the foot of the graves,” Hall said. “The back hoes going to dig new graves and the riding lawn mowers mowing the lawn every week just pushed (the plaques) almost out of sight. My father’s … was almost gone. I said to myself, ‘This has got to get fixed.’”

Hall brought the issue up with Post 236’s executive board, which agreed to sponsor the project. He then started making local contacts, including with a local company that donated stone dust to help reset the plaques. After cleaning up a few gravesites, including his father’s, Hall reached out to the local newspaper, which provided coverage of his effort and need for volunteers.

The effort resumed again this month, and will be ongoing and may include expanding to other cemeteries in the future. “We’re trying to cover all the angles that we can cover to get this thing up and moving,” Hall said. “After the last news article, I’ve gotten people stepping up saying, ‘Whatever you need, we’ll help you out’, both in monetary needs and physical labor. This last article really pulled some people out of the bushes to jump in and volunteer to help in different ways.”

Hall said he took on the responsibility of making sure the memorial plaques are visible because, “They’re disappearing out of sight, which is a tragedy in itself,” he said. “And I grew up in that town. Between my brothers and I, we peddled newspapers there for 20 years. A lot of these people I knew. A lot of them were my dad’s good friends. People I knew, they were their uncles, their brothers, kids I went to school with. I was in (the Army) during Vietnam, and a lot of people I went to school with were, too. And they’re (buried in the cemetery), unfortunately. It was really kind of a no-brainer that this needed to get done.”