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A regional partnership has brought some life back to one of Pickerington's oldest graveyards.

More than 70 volunteers spent June 6 landscaping and restoring headstones in Pisgah Cemetery, the burial plot established in 1852 at what is now the southeastern corner of the intersection of state Routes 256 and 204.

In a project that brought together the Pickerington Area Chamber of Commerce LEADS program, the Tri-County Realty Association, Keller Farms, the Pickerington-Reynoldsburg Rotary Club and the Pickerington-Violet Township Historical Society, as well as employees of the city of Pickerington and Violet Township, volunteers removed old brush, stabilized leaning memorials and planted purple perennials at what serves as the main entrance to Violet Township.

Workers also spelled out the cemetery's name in boxwood shrubs along the side that faces Route 204.

"We think it's just turned into a wonderful gateway to Pickerington, coming in from the north," said Sharon Worden, project coordinator and member of the LEADS program. "And we just hope we did justice for the families that have loved ones there."

The cemetery is the final resting place for 185 parishioners of Pisgah Church, which stood next to the site as one of Violet Township's earliest houses of worship; some of their descendants still live in the area, Worden said.

Volunteers restored memorials that had shifted, cracked and weathered on about half of these graves with the help of Danison Monumental Works, a Lancaster company that donated its expertise and equipment for the day, she said.

Even before the last volunteers left the cemetery that afternoon, the updates had already started to turn heads.

Worden said traffic slowed throughout the day as motorists passing the long-neglected site admired the restoration, and many visitors were seen walking through the cemetery that evening and the following day.

"The project was a smash hit," added Dani Patterson, a sales representative with Dominion Homes and member of the Tri-County Realty Association. "Everyone just kept commenting on how great it looks now."

Patterson helped organize the event as part of the third-annual Realtor Care Day, a community-service program sponsored by the Columbus Board of Realtors.

In addition to providing much of the labor, area Realtors also helped fund the restoration, along with Violet Township, the city of Pickerington, the LEADS program, which initiated the project, as well as Fairfield Federal, Fifth-Third Bank and the area Rotary club.

These partners also hope to install an iron gate, for which they already have a designer and installer, at the cemetery, but Worden said they need to raise about $4,000 to do so.