WATERFORD — Work on the wooden Elm Vale Cemetery entrance archway is expected to pick up again as a fundraising campaign kicks off this month.

Bill Haynes, code enforcement officer and a member of the Elm Vale Cemetery Committee, said he expects to meet with local fundraiser Bill Stockwell to develop the strategy soon.

Work was suspended last year after a $12,000 stabilization project was completed by James Long of James M. Long and Sons of Waterford. The job entailed repairing rotted bases on the south entrance, one of two archways marking the entrance to the cemetery on Sweden Road. Once the base was unearthed, Long found only one attached post of the four-post structure.

Eight-inch steel plates were welded into the rebar, set in the concrete, and bolted to the beam holding up the side structures.

It’s estimated that another $10,000 to $20,000 will be necessary to complete the restoration. The bases are now exposed.

Haynes told town meeting voters recently that leaving the bases exposed gave people a rare chance to see the interior of the archway, which is about 23- to 28-feet tall and 24-feet wide. The one under restoration is the the newer of the two.

Haynes said they have been unable to confirm specific information about the construction of the archways. It is still unclear when they were built. It is believed they were constructed after the Civil War but at separate times, with the south entrance being the newer, built perhaps around 1890.

“It’s been one of the stumbling blocks,” he said.

A reference in the 1898 Granite Monthly by a writer who went to the cemetery to visit the grave of Charles Farrar Browne,  refers to one of the archways this way: “It was a beautiful October morning, the air bland as the breath of Indian summer, when your correspondent and his better half drove up to a hitching post near the arched gateway that admits the pilgrims from every land to that hallowed enclosure. The simple tablature overhead bears in gilt letters the name of this beautiful ‘God’s Acre.’”

The writer, George Bancroft Griffith, said the Brown family plot was found after a brief search to the right of the entrance way. Brown was better known as Artemus Ward, the 19th-century humorist.

“It means a lot to a lot of people,” Haynes said of the cemetery.

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