BATON ROUGE - On Saturday, people will gather to clear wreaths off of thousands of headstones at Baton Rouge National Cemetery. The help of volunteers is needed in honoring those buried in veterans' cemeteries, both on the national and state level.

Back in December, Blue Star Mothers of Louisiana worked with Wreaths Across America to decorate every headstone in Baton Rouge National Cemetery. Now, the organization needs the public's help to clean up the site.

"Unbelievably, we received 5,100 wreaths. It's the first time that we've ever been able to do that," Blue Star Mothers of Louisiana Chapter One President Denise Singleton said. "We will come out with volunteers and we won't know how many will show up until tomorrow morning and we will have to remove these 5,091 wreaths."

Baton Rouge National Cemetery is one of the National Cemetery Administration's 155 national cemeteries.

"It is unmanned, so they don't have staff here on a full-time basis, and we chose to sponsor this cemetery because it is a big fear that these American heroes here will be forgotten," Singleton said.

National Cemeteries are federally funded. Louisiana has four national cemeteries and five state-run veterans' cemeteries. These state-run cemeteries are built with funding from VA grants, but maintenance and operation mostly come from the state's budget.

"We have very few employees compared to a national cemetery. We do more with less," Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs Cemetery Program Director Ted Krumm said.

Krumm said burial honors is part of the LDVA's mission to provide care to veterans and their families. Efforts to maintain the final resting places of American service members need help on both the state and national level.

"In Slidell, for example, they're doing 45 to 50 burials a month. That's a lot of burials with a very small staff. When you have things like pulling weeds, yes we could use volunteers to pull weeds in flower beds," Krumm said. "We always encourage [people] to have as many volunteers."

Singleton said large events like the wreath-laying ceremony and cleanup would not be possible without the community's help.

"The ability to be able to come here and do what we did could not happen without volunteers," Singleton said.

The cleanup for the Baton Rouge National Cemetery is scheduled for 9 a.m. Saturday morning at 220 N. 19th Street. Volunteers are encouraged to wear gloves, bring rakes and wagons and bring families.