Kurt Jordan breathes new life into broken headstones
STORY AND PHOTOS by Paul Newton
Just after sunrise, the few hundred headstones at Greenwick Cemetery caught the early morning sunlight in a way that grabbed Kurt Jordan’s attention. He was behind the wheel of his truck, driving toward the cemetery he had first found six years earlier. The cemetery was full of toppled headstones swallowed by earth and time back then. Today, the headstones are upright and clean, and are accompanied by QR codes that tell the story of each family buried in the cemetery.
What started as caring for a fractured family headstone in 2019 has turned into a passion for Kurt, a calling he never expected. Since then, Kurt has restored hundreds of headstones, uncovering forgotten stories and giving families a little piece of their history back free of charge.
Kurt’s passion project began with a request from his late father. “He told me he discovered this cemetery north of St. Joseph where some of our ancestors were and three of their headstones were toppled over,” he says. “He asked if I would help put them back together.”
First, Kurt began to research the basics and eventually cleaned and reset his family’s headstones.
“Once I finished — or at least thought I was finished — I looked around the cemetery,” he says. “It was 4 acres and more than 200 headstones were in disarray and broken. It struck me that somebody has to take responsibility for this.”
Kurt reached out to professionals in the field of cemetery restoration and received the proper training needed to really take on a big project. After securing the blessing of the Andrew County commissioners, the Co-Mo Electric Cooperative member got to work.
He completed every part of the Greenwick project himself, a commitment that lasted five years. Some headstones were so deeply buried they were already lost to history. He made the one-hour drive each way from his southern Kansas City home for each visit, worked six or seven hours a day and returned again and again until the cemetery looked the way it once did. “It sounds like it was a grind, and I guess it was,” Kurt says. “But it was truly a labor of love.”
Beyond Greenwick
Greenwick was only the beginning. Counties, cemetery boards and families began reaching out, and Kurt kept saying yes. He used his professional training in cemetery preservation to teach others, too. He has restored hundreds more markers — mostly across western Missouri — and he has never taken a dollar for the work. “Everything’s free of charge. I’ve never charged,” he says. Instead, he encourages grateful families to donate to their local cemetery boards.
Cemetery preservation came as an unexpected next chapter after retiring as an executive at Sherwin-Williams Paints in Dallas. On a cool morning in November, Kurt reflected on his journey from being a big-city executive while working on his knees cleaning a headstone in the Odd Fellows Cemetery just north of Otterville.
“In an odd and peculiar way, what I’m doing now is much more rewarding,” he says. “I enjoyed my career, but this is a way to give back to society in a meaningful way. I get to breathe fresh air, be outside and hopefully get these monuments back to something similar to when they were installed; it’s pretty powerful.”
Along the way, Kurt has done his own research and partnered with genealogists to uncover countless forgotten stories of the names and families he brings back into the light. After working in a cemetery, he would try and find the stories behind the stones.
“I like to look up what these individuals did for a living,” he says. “Or you’d see a whole family that was wiped out in a year and it was something like cholera. You really get a sense of how families were interconnected when you look back, collectively, and with other families.”
Do no harm
Kurt does everything from a basic cleaning of a headstone to completely restoring headstones or 900-pound obelisks that are broken into pieces. He uses only items, such as D/2 biological solution and tampico brushes, approved by the National Park Service as safe for the stones. He also follows the do-no-harm process, meaning if a stone is deteriorated beyond where it should be touched, he’ll walk away.
He receives requests from across Missouri and into Kansas, but mainly focuses his efforts on cemeteries in western Missouri. Though the more interesting the renovation, the more willing he is to travel he says. He doesn’t keep track of the number of headstones he’s worked on the past six years, but estimates it to be nearing 1,000. He’s in the process of preserving his own history as he’s writing a book on his efforts, “Bigger Than Headstones.”
Kurt has also led community classes on cleaning gravestones, including 10 classes across Missouri in 2025. He provides the cleaning products, brushes and scrapers all free of charge.
It’s all part of Kurt’s post-career passion of preserving history and honoring those who came before us in ways big and small. “One peculiar thing I do is that I say the names of the individuals out loud, recognizing I might be the first person that has said that name out loud in 150 years,” he says. “Just like everything I try and do, it’s just a way to keep their legacy alive.”
For more information on Kurt and his restoration efforts, visit kccemeteryman.com or email kurt@kccemeteryman.com.
Email Paul Newton at pnewton@ruralmissouri.coop.