FAIRHOPE — The first grave Jesse Payne remembers working on is a grave for a 2-year-old boy at Brook Cedron Cemetery in Barnwell.

Payne recalls it was "the cutest little grave" with a marble headstone, but you wouldn't be able to tell it was marble due to how dirty and grimy it was.

"A lot of marble specifically, if you do marble headstones, they'll have the veinage in them and you wouldn't be able to see that unless you clean it," Payne said. "The first grave that I did, it was mostly gray and it had like a veinage of white in it. It was gorgeous."

Payne is the founder of Friends of Baldwin County Cemeteries, a volunteer group consisting of friends and family, which she started in 2025 to clean and restore gravestones across Baldwin County.

Payne, who was born and raised in Fairhope, takes care of the graves of her family located within Brook Cedron Cemetery in Barnwell, where she says multiple generations of her family are buried, such as her grandparents Gordon and Barbara Childress. There, she replenishes the flowers, picks the weeds and keeps the graves clean.

"I kind of noticed there was like fake flowers everywhere. There's trash everywhere," Payne said. "I kept telling myself, "My God, I can't believe the council or whoever, the board, is not taking care of this. That happened several times and I was like 'Well, why don't I just do something about it?'"

Payne is no stranger when it comes to working in cemeteries, working as a licensed funeral director, embalmer and cremationist, and has taken it upon herself to take care of graves and headstones across the county as a side gig.

"Being a (funeral director), you have to go to the cemetery, you have to look at people who've passed away and you have to help them with the grieving process and everything like that, so I think it's absolutely helped me," Payne said.

Payne arrives early in the morning, typically between 7:30 and 8 a.m., to do her work, where she picks weeds, picks up trash and cleans the headstones. To clean them, she uses D/2 Biological Solution, which she said is also used to clean and maintain veteran graves at national cemeteries. Depending on the state of the grave, the cleaning and restoration process could take anywhere from a couple of hours to days.

Some take longer to restore than others, such as a double gravestone for E.L. and Robert Jackson, who died in the early 1900s. The headstone was broken across multiple pieces, so it took a week to fully restore it, reconnecting the pieces using a stone-safe epoxy that requires 24 hours to cure.

Payne estimates that she has worked on between 50 and 75 graves, mostly historical graves that date back to before the 1970s, with the permission of the cemeteries and families if they are still around.

"I recently did a couple of graves for a gentleman," Payne said. "Of course, you've got that black mold and lichen there, and people don't realize that you can get that off no problem with the correct steps and everything like that. He was just amazed. He was flabbergasted, really. It makes them look refreshed."

Along with Brook Cedron Cemetery, she has also done work in the Fairhope area, such as at Twin Beech Cemetery, Overton Davis Cemetery and the abandoned Mount Sinai Cemetery, along with places such as High Pine Cemetery in Bay Minette.

Payne encourages people to follow the Friends of Baldwin County Cemeteries Facebook page, where she posts her work and organizes community cleanup days where people can help participate in cleaning local cemeteries.

Despite constantly working around death, Payne said death doesn't bother her at all.

"It does the opposite in fact," Payne said. "I ask people this all the time. I'm like, 'Do you know whether or not what you want to do? Is there a plan? Have you talked about it?' My family gets annoyed by me now because I'm like 'So what do you want after you die? What do you want to do? You want to do cremation? You want to do burial? You want to have a green burial?' I think the importance of talking about death is huge because you just never know when it's going to happen. You really don't."