AUBURN - Mike Locastro maneuvered an Upstate Paving excavator on its rolling tracks among the Fort Hill Cemetery gravestones that are between 100 and 200 years old.

The excavator left gouge marks in the cemetery's grass Saturday morning. But the heavy equipment had a minuscule impact on the serenity of a cemetery with massive trees and dozens of ornate Victorian gravestones, unlike the vandalism of close to 100 burial markers last weekend.

Upstate Paving sent the excavator and Locastro and Joe Quill, the head truck driver, to the cemetery to do the free repair of heavy gravestones sent sliding down too far for cemetery employees to restore by hand.

On the steep grade of the south slope of the Mount Vernon section, gravity and the settling of earth has pulled some of these headstones to a slant. The section has aging gravestones that all overlook a traffic circle ringing the Burr family plot. In the plot, an obelisk topped by a burning torch is circled by 14 individual stones.

But in one night, vandals destroyed the artistry of the original gravestone makers and the preservation efforts of generations of cemetery caretakers. They pushed several gravestones topped with obelisks skidding 20 to 30 feet down the Mount Vernon slope.

Just to “get their thrill out of it,” said Dennis Jones, who has worked at the cemetery for 19 years.

The Upstate Paving pair and Jones and Norman Vanholtz, another Fort Hill employee, worked together on Saturday's restoration.

They swirled spicy mustard-colored concrete adhesive on the bases of the gravestones.

To project the first stone, an early 1800s marker for Henry and Huldah Almy and their children, they placed pieces of wood between the stone's surface and the chain tightening around the neck of the tall pillar.

The excavator's bucket lifted the chain to guide the stone onto its base.

Once in place, the bucket became an extended hand slowly curving to meet the protective edge of wood propped against the stone's side.

The bucket pushed the marker's pillar inch by inch into the right spot.

A mourning dove called, a turkey vulture flew over and fast-moving clouds blew southwest, as they did their work.

After a similar repair of three more obelisk-style marble and granite headstones, they drove the excavator to the Burr family circle, where cemetery groundskeepers had moved two stones sent skidding by the vandals down an unwalkable slope onto the graveyard road below.

Locastro cupped these two smaller square stones in the excavator's bucket and drove them to be set back on their bases.

One stone marks the site of Rev. Malcolm MacLaren's body, who lived between 1798 and 1887.

Jones, Vanholtz and other cemetery employees already repaired most of the displaced and damaged gravestones in the past week.

Saturday's work with the help of Upstate Paving concluded the last major repair effort. But three or four stones are broken in half and can't be repaired, Jones said.

He found it particularly mournful that a Louise Agnes Moses' unique Mount Vernon section stone with an ornate frame of leaves and flowers is cleaved in two.

Two stone slabs covering the grave sites of relatives to William Seward and his wife, Frances, were smashed and can never be fully repaired.

Before the thunderstorms late last week, footprints walking over Seward's grave and the graves of his relatives could still be seen.

“We just have to try and put them back together,” Jones said.

Originally, 70 headstones were estimated to have been tipped over or damaged.

But more than 100 have been damaged, including one defaced with writing referring to male and female genitalia.

Damage was observed in seven sections of the cemetery.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net