LYNDEBOROUGH — Volunteers worked through the heat to repair a stone retaining wall at the South Lyndeborough Common as part of a long-term project to improve the area where the town’s veterans’ monuments have been placed.

Monuments Committee chairman Scott Roper said it took the volunteers a little more than three hours on July 10 to repair the wall, which lined a drainage ditch and had been hidden by brush.

“Most of us didn’t know the wall was even there,” Roper said. “We didn’t notice it until we were clearing brush back in April. We saw that part of it had collapsed, and we decided if we wanted to make the area safe, the first step would be to rebuild that wall so the earth doesn’t go crashing into the ditch.”

Roper said passersby may not immediately notice the repaired wall, but it is an important step in ensuring the stability of the land around the common. Some of the stones for the wall were missing and others had fallen into the ditch over time, but volunteers had some help lifting the heavy stones thanks to a truck with a boom donated for the morning by Chappell Tractor Sales of Milford.

The committee moved the town’s veterans’ monuments from outside Center Hall to the common last May, and has since been working to beautify the area. For now, the monuments and a Civil War-era cannon are in temporary locations until site preparation is completed.

Several trees have been cleared and brush has been removed to open up the area. At some point, when the common starts to take shape, the monuments and cannon will be rearranged at their permanent location on the common. Roper said the committee has big plans for the common, which until recently had been a mostly forgotten slice of land between Route 31 and Cemetery Road.

“This is now a long-term project. Little by little we’re trying to improve the site and get it ready for the final placement of the monuments,” Roper said. “The thing we’re probably going to do first is we need to put a Christmas tree on the common, because in the clearing we did, we had to take down the other one because it had grown too big.”

The committee is also looking to add a monument for Vietnam War veterans.

“It’s about time we put one in for the people who served in Vietnam. But we’re going to need funds,” Roper said.

To help raise those funds, the committee plans to sell decorative memorial bricks. Residents will be able to purchase a brick to have it engraved with a person’s name and placed on the common. The committee is still forming a plan for how to organize and display the bricks on the common, Roper said.

The committee hasn’t yet discussed a timeline for when improvements to the common could be completed, but Roper said he’d like to see work on the common completed by 2014 at the latest, to mark the 100th anniversary of when the Village Improvement Society created the town common.

“It will really all depend on how the fundraising goes,” he said. “We do know it’s going to take about $30,000 to do everything we want. It’s a lot of money, but I think we can do it.”