We’ve come a long way as an Association over the years, always trying to improve and provide more value for our members. Over the last few years we’ve started to become a bit more streamlined and efficient, especially in the last two years. Through Andrew Pelkey’s excellent leadership and the hard work of Kathryn Sicard, our Executive Director, along with Carolyn Isaak, Annette Zamarchi, and others, we finally entered into the 21st century with our new electronic newsletter. One of the features of this new newsletter is to have you hear from those of us on the Board, to introduce, or re-introduce ourselves to you, the members, letting you know who we are and what we do — and I guess I get to be first.

I joined NHLA back in the late ’80s, not long after I started my business. I attended anything and everything that NHLA and its close partnership with the NH Cooperative Extension put on back then. Dinner meetings, seminars, design classes, and demonstrations from pruning to wall building. Since I was at most everything NHLA put on I became a fairly familiar face and was eventually recruited to the Board in 2003. Since then I’ve been vice-president, president, and past president three times and still try to attend just about everything NHLA offers. The Association has been, and continues to be, integral to my continuing education and career.

Although my business has always encompassed full landscaping services my favorite thing to do was and is to build stone walls. When I first started in landscaping in 1979 I was hired by Rick Rideout (a past president of NHLA) who had just started his company, Three Season Landscaping. Rick was a pretty accomplished wall builder, and he taught me the basics of wall building. During those first few years I was never allowed to place a face stone. My job was tending, backfilling, and watching.

Occasionally Rick would farm me out to other wall builders like Derrick Owen’s crew where I got to learn from Kevin Gardner who has since written several books on wall building and the history of stonewalls in New Hampshire. When I finally went out on my own I had a good foundation for most aspects of landscaping, and when I joined NHLA I just continued learning everything I could through the Association, UNH, NHTI, and anybody that would answer my questions.

Fast forward to today. I’ve been in business now for almost forty years and I think I have a pretty decent portfolio of work and walls that I’ve built. In 2023 I was lucky enough to be asked to submit a bid on reconstructing a wall in the oldest section of Blossom Hill Cemetery in Concord, NH. The wall sits below the White Family mausoleum which was constructed for Armenia and Nathaniel White sometime in the 1870s. Over time, of course, the land above the wall shifted and started to erode putting pressure on the wall and causing it to fail. In 2016 jersey barriers were put in place and backfilled with 3/4″ stone to keep the wall from pushing out any further.

At the end of 2023 I was informed that my bid had been accepted and I began the dismantling of the wall and excavation at the end of August 2024. The wall on the east side of the steps leading up to the mausoleum was dry laid with field stone and the section of wall to the west of the steps was mortared granite block. I carefully dismantled the 250′ wall placing the stones and blocks in order so that the capstones were at the back of the windrow and the base stones were at the front ready to be placed back into the wall. I discovered while taking the wall apart that there was no backfill stone whatsoever and the huge base stones/blocks had been set directly in the soil. No gravel base like we do now. I excavated and prepared a gravel base that was 4′ to 5′ wide and 18″ deep. The cemetery crew had to excavate the slope on the west side of the steps as there were several grave sites that were 2′ from the cut and no one was quite sure if the graves had slid over the years. We were lucky though, and nothing was found or had to be moved.

After the base was prepped and compacted with 1 1/2″ gravel the base stones started going back in and construction began. 80% of the stone taken from the wall was reused as well as granite foundation block that I purchased, and that luckily matched the original stone perfectly. At the back of the cemetery there are several small quarries, and I hauled several loads out from them. Using feather and wedges I cut and shaped a lot of the pieces that are now in the wall. It took about 7 months to construct the dry laid wall working mostly by myself with my excavator and help from a friend of mine. I finished the wall itself at the end March, but I had to pull off the project to get started on another job on lake Winnipesaukee. Here we are in July and I’m back to Blossom Hill to cap the wall and get started on another wall in the same cemetery. I’m honored to have been chosen to rebuild this historic wall and hopefully it will there for another couple of hundred years.

by Dave DeJohn, NHCLP, NHLA past president