As I was driving around aimlessly looking for a hiking trail I was distracted by a sweet little cemetery on a hill. It had a little brick crypt (fancy!) and even an iron gate reading “1790.” Well, that’s all I needed… I’m in! I parked the car aside the road and grabbed my camera.
This was a well manicured cemetery but it was clearly old and out of use. I didn’t see any stones past the mid 1800’s. The vast majority of them were slate with the usual decals and a few oddities. If you read this blog often you know I have a deep fondness for slate stones but today my attention was drawn to the few marble memorials that were sitting near the gate. One was a little lamb, dedicated to a toddler. It’s always sad seeing these but the marble lambs age so interestingly. This one was completely intact (frequently the lambs loose their heads or ears) and was covered in lichen. Little spooky, nice for an artsy photo, and then I saw the big memorials behind it. One was of an open book, again so covered in lichen it was unreadable, and next to the book on alter was one of the most heart-stopping and unique memorials I have ever seen. It belonged to a boy named Johnnie whose bust I can only assume it was, lying as if asleep, forever immortalized in marble. It evoked a profound sense of grief and sympathy for the loss of a child. I was unable to track down any information on the poor soul but his stone reads:
HERE LIES THE REMAINS OF THE BELOVED CHILD OF J.&.E. HARTNOLL JOHNNIE A. BORN IN DEVONSHIRE ENGLAND MAY 11 1868 DIED IN MASON N.H. JULY 14 1878 AT REST
The other notable stone was on the opposite side of the cemetery and was where the remains of the first president of Harvard college Henry Dunster was laid to rest. There are also a number of revolutionary war soldiers here, mostly fatalities from Bunker Hill. Oddly no one left pennies on their graves. I take it this place is not visited often.
However if you’re into history the Uncle Sam house is less than a mile away. And on this day I decided to close out my day by enjoying the Mason Rail Trail nearby.
It’s funny. It seems I have been all over the place – this blog started when I went to all the lower 48 states, and then Europe, and then decided to explore all corners of New England, but what I haven’t done in all that time is pay any attention whatsoever to the town where I was raised and spent the majority of my life: Rindge NH. And what a perfect time to explore a deserted cemetery so close to home than when we’re all still being super cautious about the corona virus.
So that’s how I ended up in the center of Rindge at the Meetinghouse Cemetery. I parked at the church because I had a foggy recollection that there was a gap in the fence I could walk through at the corner of it. Indeed there is, as well as a proper entrance adjacent to the current town hall just down the street a little ways where the old crypt still stands. Parking at either is easy and doesn’t bother anyone.
I hadn’t visited this place since I was probably 12 or 13 years old and had a friend living nearby. We’d walked the cemetery and played in the town center – once giving the dog officer a hell of a scare as we bounded through the snow in the common on one particularly dark evening. But happy childhood memories aside, this is the heart of the historic parts of Rindge and it’s got a lot of stories to tell. And what a better day to tell them than on a rainy day like this?! The perfect activity for those of you going nuts in quarantine – no one walks through old cemeteries in the rain… well, except for me and a handful of other delightfully weird people.
I have to say I don’t remember this being the most hill-filled graveyard I have ever been too. WHEW! There was no effort whatsoever put into flattening the ground here but I must admit that adds to how dramatic it feels with slate stones dating back to the 1700’s and creepy barren trees on all sides. Still it was super peaceful and welcoming to the photographer in me. (Though people driving by absolutely did notice me there. Probably thought I was the Ghost of the 1970’s with my orange plaid bellbottoms.)
A Little About the Stones…
I’ve learned a few things over the years about these old graveyards and cemeteries. The first is the difference between a cemetery, which is just a generalized burial ground, and a graveyard which is the consecrated ground surrounding a church. The slate stones that were favored in the 1700’s were mostly mass produced in Boston. As such many have the same designs on them. Today I saw mostly Death Heads (a symbol of rebirth and resurrections) and weeping willows. As usual the stones closest to the church were both the oldest and frequently the most wealthy. You can tell by how large they are as they range from little more than a foot tall to five or six feet. People of wealth in those days often were tied to either religious institutions or the military. You can see several Minute Men buried here who usually have metal markers aside their grave.
Was there anyone of particular note residing here? I actually don’t know. I suspect there are a lot of people that were important to the town back in the day but this was a while ago. I didn’t see any stones that dated any younger than 1901. This… is a forgotten place.
Other Things to See Nearby
That being said there are a few other things to see nearby if you’re there anyway. Directly across the street is the ruins of an old foundation that used to be our old town shelter for both abused animals and battered women. This was not unusual as the Humane Society functioned more as peace officers for domestic abuse situations than they did as animal rescuers although they fulfilled both roles. How much of a need did we have for this little building I have no idea but suffice to say if you were in need you’d be kept there…
Not far from the ruined foundation there’s a tiny park dedicated to our veterans. There’s a few benches, a little memorial, some flags. From here you can look over the town common which used to be used as a livestock exchange and open air market. Today it holds a gazebo used for weddings and one of only two antique livestock scales left in New England which we proudly use every year for the great pumpkin weigh-off. So how big can a pumpkin get? apparently over 2,500 pounds… and let me tell you moving these giant orange beasts is a challenge. Worth coming out just to see that!
And so that’s my little town center. Thanks for stopping by to enjoy it with me. Below are five galleries of photos I took, organized by topic.
Gallery One: Super Dramatic Multiple Stone Photos
Gallery Two: Some Individual Stones
Gallery Three: Artsy Close Ups
Gallery Four: Other Things to See
This structure was used to house carriage horses during church services.
I can’t even begin to tell you how thrilled I was to get a chance to see the inside of the S K Pierce mansion! I have driven by it hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, and I always wondered what was in it. Of course before 1999 it was basically a giant derelict building only a few breaths away from being condemned. The roof was a sieve, the top floor was completely trashed from water damage, and pigeons had taken residence up there for years. And yet even in that state I still looked at in wonder – having both a weakness for Victorian houses and the broken. I didn’t know then it was haunted but the other townsfolk did… the place had a reputation!
Since then it has gone through three more sets of owners, throwing two into financial ruin trying to repair it. The current owners bought this 21 room fixer upper for a shockingly low $315,000 sight unseen because they wanted a haunted house. WELL. Careful what you wish for, this house seems to chew people up and spit them out… almost everyone whose ever owned it fell into complete financial ruin, at least two people died there, and there’s a rumor that a visiting artist went stark raving mad here – or at least that’s what his painting suggest as they get increasing disturbing over the years. In addition to this the house itself has a turbulent history that includes being used as a hotel and a boarding house. In fact it was when it was being used as a boarding house that another local craftsman and artist fell asleep with a lit cigarette and burned to death in one of the rooms.
Since the millennium the house was so haunted that one of the three sets of owners basically fled but not before making this place infamous! It’s been on tons of TV shows – Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Scariest Places in America, Chronicle, you name it! So obviously knowing it was haunted my curiosity was even more peaked. So is it? Well, here was my experience…
Upon walking up to the place nothing seemed amiss. And as we were heralded into the house I was not met with any sense of foreboding. If anything this place seemed to have a happy upbeat vibe in the sitting room while we waited for everyone to arrive. I had gone with my mother and her friend who had invited us to this tour. She remembered walking to school every day and passing this house wondering who the man in the window was. Now she was wondering whether or not there really was a man in the window or if perhaps he was an apparition. That was the answer she was seeking knowing there was a ghost boy who ran around and was seen in the windows all the time by people going by. No boy lives there.
As we waited my mother sat next to a fireplace watching the pokers sway. I noticed them swaying too but we were also right next to a register so I thought nothing of it. Probably heat moving them around but she claims this wasn’t’ the case, that she put her hand over the register to see if it was blowing anything and didn’t feel a breeze near the pokers. Well OK, maybe. I still wasn’t convinced.
Now this house was like a giant dollhouse, all decked up with Victorian flair and absolutely insane embossed wallpaper. I was loving it even if there wasn’t any ghosts. Still, the tour guide claimed there were twelve spirits here including a ghost cat in the basement. Well, that’s a little odd, I have to admit..
As the tour started to go through the other rooms it was just phenomenal how technologically advanced this mansion was for the time it was built. It had a dumb waiter that went all the way up to the second floor but not the third – because that was the servant’s quarters and why would making their lives easier be necessary? Similarly there were four fire places and metal panels in the chimney to aid radiant heat but they were also all on the first and second floor. The servants were left to the top floor with no heat source whatsoever which I imagine with really high ceilings it must have been colder than a witch’s tit up there! Finally there was speaking tubes and bells, buttons, and buzzers all to aid in contacting the help. The speaking tubes served as a rudimentary intercom long before such a thing was invented. Another engineering marvel was a cistern that collected a truly massive amount of water from the roof to use for laundry and whatnot. And laundry? It had it’s own heated kiln to make the water warm enough to wash the clothes! I have never come across such a thing… talk about luxury!
Washing Machine with kiln for heated water!
The house maintained a few little wash rooms where basins were kept to just illustrate how bathing was done in the day – via sponge bath. Still… seemed pretty luxurious. We went through the rooms and learned their history. I even found myself in the room the guy died in flames in and I felt nothing out of the ordinary. I was starting to suspect this house was all hype but just as I was thinking that I entered the stairway to go to the third floor, the servants quarters, and I was hit by a wall of anxiety that nearly flung me off my feet!
Earlier on someone had asked why some of the servants stayed behind as spirits, did they just love their job that much? To which the guy laughed and said no, most certainly not, and damn I could really feel that right now! This anxiety permeated my whole being the entire time I was up on the third floor getting worse and worse until I entered a pink room where the whole group of people stopped breathing all at once. You could hear a pin drop. It was the weirdest thing. This room was so quiet, too quiet. It was calming, like a total sense of zen. Our guide claimed a psychic told a story about a teenager who lost a baby in here and how many people feel overwhelmed with sadness entering it but no one here felt sad… they felt…. still. It was peaceful. I could have curled up on that bed and taken a blissful nap!
But then I left the pink room and was immediately assailed with that sense of anxiety and dread again. I was hiding it as best I could but by they time I climbed the spiral staircase to the tower my mother was noticing me acting squirrely. I blamed it on the heights but it wasn’t the heights. By now my legs were shaking uncontrollably. It was just panic… But I was still enjoying it! The tower showed a lovely view all around it and I took a few snaps before descending the stairs again. By now the tour was headed to the basement and out of the area! Woo!
So I headed back down and on that staircase between the second and third floor my little panic attack became too much to bear. By now the anxiety I was feeling was through the roof. Not only was I shaking I was getting that tight chest/can’t breathe feeling. The last two steps down I literally had to pause and tap the wall a few times with my hand to reassure myself to come back to the present. The second I got off the staircase… it was gone. I was back in a well lit house feeling pleasant and normal. What the….
After touring the delightful cellar we were done with the tour and allowed to wander at will for half an hour. I got back together with my mother’s friend who wanted to borrow my eyes to see if I could help determine what the writing on the wall upstairs near the cistern said. It appeared to be a marriage contract with signed witnesses from 1902. Why, I have no idea. But this was the third floor again! And I was back to being wobbly! Meanwhile my mother had wandered off and chosen a room on the third floor to just sit and relax with her eyes closed. She wasn’t right when she came out. I asked what was up. She said she felt weird. I prodded further and she said she was light headed. I suggested we leave the third floor.
All and all it was a great experience. If they succeed in making it a bed and breakfast I’ll be back… to stay the night… on the third floor… because that’s who I am! And you know what? I thought the creepiest place would be the dank cellar but it wasn’t! That cellar was positively happy.
Anyway. I took all sorts of photos. Interestingly a shadow had shown up on the staircase I was having an issue with. Now I can’t rule out that it’s not me casting it buuuut the more I looked at it the more I started to doubt because it does not have any arms outstretched which I would have had taking the photo. HMMM…
Below is ALL the photos I took which I am sure are quite boring unless…. you find something weird in them. If so let me know!
Yesterday I passed this cemetery and noted that I had to go check it out because of all the slate stones I could see from the road. Had I not been running errands I would have stopped right then and there but alas I had to wait until today to satiate my curiosity.
The cemetery is easy to find. It’s on Old Street Road between East Hill Road and Glen Drive. It’s marked by a large green historical marker and has space for a few cars to parallel park in the front of it. The numerous plaques and markers denote this is the resting place of a great many Revolutionary War soldiers, including a famous drummer by the name of William Diamond. It was also Peterborough’s first cemetery and wow, did I hit the jackpot here! This had to be the largest gathering of slate stones I have ever seen. This was a sizable and old cemetery. I would have never guessed Peterborough was this bustling so long ago!
But first I had to get in. A sign out front said the hours and a few limitations (no pets or stone rubbings allowed) but when I got to the gate it seemed to be welded shut. It was weird. There was already a car here so someone was already in the cemetery but I couldn’t see them. How did they get in?? I tugged at the gate. Nothing. I contemplated jumping over the wall but there were too many cars going by and I am rather recognizable with neon orange hair and psychedelic bell bottoms. After getting frustrated I said, “OK. I will be back!”
Later that day I was talking to my mother about all this and she said there had to be a way in. “I bet you that gate opened somehow.” So I put her up to the task and we both headed out for attempt number two. As it turns out the gate isn’t welded shut it’s just stuck – quite stubbornly. With enough wiggling and pulling it finally opened.
By now I had gone online and realized that this cemetery was only 77% photographed and there were five open requests out to find five separate grave markers:
William Wallace (1698 – ??) Jane Mitchel (1721-1791) Jane Chamberlin (1820-1822) Benjamin Chamberlin (??-1819) and William Robbe (1692-1791)
Two of these were babies during their deaths about a hundred years ago. Who is searching for the grave markers of long dead babies!? I mean I understand the adults – it’s probably a genealogy thing, but babies never grew up to have descendants and with almost a hundred years since their death there’s no one in living memory to want to see their memorial either… It sounds really crass but often times the memorials of infants and babies are… ephemeral. They’re small, often lack a lot of information, sometimes they don’t have any writing on them at all. In the case of stillbirths they’re frequently buried without a name. Today the death of a baby is a tragedy but a hundred, two hundred years ago? It was just another every day event.
Possible gravestone stump to the right…
Still – knowing someone was looking I was determined. I WILL FIND YOU! EVEN THE BABIES! I looked to see if there were any more information on any of these individuals and came up pretty empty handed. In fact the information online about everyone here seemed shockingly scarce for what I felt to be quite a historic place. But alas even the revolutionary war soldiers had only the shortest and most cryptic of descriptions online – birth place, birth and death dates, time of service, if they were married or had kids, and nothing more. Pretty basic stuff. I also found no pennies here. These historical figures were…. completely and utterly forgotten.
It was weird. The cemetery seems like it’s kept really well. Some of the stones were repaired or replaced but most were still in pristine condition. This made the missing stones all the more confusing. It was a bright hot day and almost the whole cemetery is in full sunlight with no shade. I started in the corner and made a beeline for the back where I figured the oldest stones may be. And sure enough I found the Robbe family plot which spanned two centuries and seemed to have all the Robbe’s… except for William. Where are you hiding William? Do you even have a stone here? Or did you ever get one? Or did it somehow get destroyed? There was a rock in the ground which I couldn’t tell if it was just another random rock in the ground or a part of a gravestone that no longer had a top. Hmmmm. The mystery thickens!
And by now the mugginess and heat where getting to the both of us so I had to call it a day. I’m not done yet though. I will be back… perhaps with a map of plots in hand to help guide me. And in the meantime I joined Find a Grave and will offer my photos and finds as they are warranted since I am already touring these places anyway. Might as well make myself useful!
There’s also a two trailheads on the same street and well… I am going to need to check those out too…
Vermont in particular seems to have a long and bizarre history when it comes to interesting ordinary individuals. One of those people I just learned was Phineas Gage. If you don’t know who Phineas Gage is you’re not alone. Mostly it’s people in the psychiatric and medical professions that know his name. He was just a normal railway worker living his life when an accident launched him into the pages of history.
It happened in 1848 when he was working on the rails south of the village of Cavendish Vermont. The railways went directly through mountainous areas which meant that workers had to blast their way through in order to put the rails down. This was dangerous work that involved boring a hole in the rock, filling it with explosives, and packing sand on top with an iron rod (called a tamping iron) before lighting a fuse. Phineas was in the process of doing this when his attention was distracted and when he turned his head to speak the tamping iron struck the rock, caused an unexpected spark, and before he had any time to react he had the 13 pound 3 foot rod shot through his head which landed 85 feet away. This would have been the end for most workers but not Gage who convulsed a few times before getting up and staying conscious well past getting to the hospital. Insanely stoic this guy claimed he wasn’t hurt much and should be back to work in a few days. Granted going to the doctors in the 1800’s wasn’t as sterile or educated as it is today. Gage’s recovery was up and down and at one point included the draining of a fungal abscess on his remaining brain issue which may have caused further damage.
Today I visited the spot of the memorial plaque dedicated to this very unlikely survivor. It sits in the Cavendish common which isn’t the site of the accident but is nearby. I parked at the Municipal building which is just behind the monument that is welded to a rock. I’m afraid my photo isn’t fantastic but it shows in brief detail the life of a man that is more of a curiosity now than he was in his own life (and he was very well known then for it.)
If you’re wondering what happened to Gage after his recovery well… that’s where the story gets quite muddy. What is known is that Gage survived his injury and that for what appears a short time afterward he showed symptoms not uncommon among brain-injured patients but remarkably despite his story being repeatedly rewritten for political reasons he seems to have gone on to live a pretty normal life… His intelligence was said to be unaffected, his memory returned, and he even held down numerous jobs before seizures prevented him from keeping them. We don’t know why he died or if his injury had any real lasting effects on his personality because there seems to be a lot of conflicting information.
Other common myths around this one remarkable individual is that his injury gave inspiration for the invention of lobotomies. There’s no written evidence of this but I have to wonder why it’s been linked in the first place. As I read up on this to create this blog entry I was filled with far more questions than answers. Did he have any serious personalty changes after the accident and if so did they get better over time? Maybe the lesson in his story isn’t whether or not brain damage can make someone a different person but to what extent one can expect to recover from such a thing. Maybe this is really about the remarkable plasticity of the brain.
This photo of the man was discovered in 2009. In it he sits with his tamping iron which toured with him throughout New England in the two years after the accident. It’s unsettling to say the least.
After leaving the monument I asked the GPS where to go and by happenstance it dragged me onto a narrow dirt road where the same rail line ran through the woods. It was a strange moment to realize this. All and all today’s visit to the Phineas Gage memorial and the Fort at Number 4 satiated my desire for history. Until next time…
It was this and several other little memories that brought me back today as I found myself once again on the road. The Fort at Number Four is a reconstruction of a wooden fort that stood in the fourth plantation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1735. It was the North Westernmost British settlement in the New World. By 1745 ten families lived within the confines of the fort behind big fortified walls. There were living quarters, a saw mill, gardens, a barn, a black smith shop all nested in the woods like some sort of antisocial wooden castle blockading itself from the rest of the world. Why was such a thing necessary? Well because diplomacy apparently wasn’t one of the settlers’ biggest skills and the “Indians” (which are still referred to as such in the pamphlets they were handing out today) were a little testy about the new neighbors claiming their land as their own. And from there it appears there were some dust ups involving the British, the French, the occasional Spaniard… to me this seems like lunacy. For ten families to live in what amount to the wilderness – thirty five miles from the closest settlement. But OK.
Oh today’s tour was going to be good if this is what I went in there thinking. I am happy to note it was a really easy place to find and on a Thursday pretty much no one was there except a woman taking admission fees ($12 per adult) and one melting tour guide in period garb who I found playing Hoops with some children. He offered everyone else guided tours but myself and the older couple who came in at the same time as me politely declined to go wander on our own. I like allowing myself time and space to take photos from odd angles and such.
Here’s a photo of my knees giving a solid “fuck you” for climbing to the top of the tower. These stairs have to be climbed down backwards like a latter. Fun.
First off I should remark that you shouldn’t revisit places form your childhood that you once thought were so grand because when you get there and realize just how tiny and insignificant they are your perceptions will be RUINED. I headed up the tower, which by the way is only three stories high, and looked out over the river. Yup. There was Vermont. Looking all green and sleepy as she usually does. The view was sooo…. unspectacular, but I guess it would be for someone who has flown in planes, peered down from the Penobscot Bridge Observatory, and nearly died of exhaustion dragging my sorry ass to the top of the Empire State Building. Life and experience had dampened my reaction.
I remembered literally nothing else of the fort from those sweet early days and I was actually happily surprised how expansive the place was. Plus it smelled like old barn wood which made me deliriously happy. Of course being unlit it was pretty dark in spots but that made it all the more fun. Coming into the kitchen I found a number of herbs hanging to dry. One of them brought me straight back to my childhood. It smelled SO FAMILIAR but I don’t know what it was… something from my days in the first house I lived in. I was grinning from ear to ear. The fort seemed to have a lot of personality even with very sparse furnishings. It was indeed the perfect space to play with my photography – the lighting, the architecture, the odd artifacts, all lent themselves beautifully to this task.
Yup, those would be two child-sized coffins int he rafters. Daring motif.
Then I got to looking around – and having a bit of fun with the artifacts. being as this was basically set up for children many of the exhibits were hands-on like the series of pelts that lined the walls of one of the buildings that made up a sort of macabre dead petting zoo of sorts. It wasn’t the most morbid thing by far, there were two child-size coffins in the workshop, and another plaque telling the history of the place said something about “murder holes” being needed to protect the families in their bedrooms. Murder holes. To protect the family. In their beds. Just let that sink in. But the weirdest thing I found was a diorama of the place. There were soldiers reenacting a battle all around it, which I get, but why they were wearing Scottish kilts and who they were fighting…. fuck if I know. Maybe there was a sale on figurines that day. Kilted ones. Or maybe there’s something the brochures aren’t telling me. Quite frankly I left a bit confused and only took one feeble shot of this weird scene because I didn’t feel like being that person taking photos of the diorama. Seriously. That guy. We all know that guy. I still have pride. I wandered off to fondle the zombie pets.
Besides the mystery Scottish militia there seems to be a vaguely Turkish looking dude in the back swinging a bayonet at nothing. I have no idea who they’ve killed.
I spent maybe an hour or so poking around. It was a sweet little way to spend an afternoon. After this I allowed the GPS to try and kill me leading me through increasingly narrow dirt roads on the search for my next destination – the scene of Phineas Gage’s fateful railway accident.
My final stop today was in the South Cemetery in Wendell Massachusetts. It was really weird. I had a moment of deja vu when I saw it. I don’t know when it was but I know I have passed this cemetery before and I knew then I wanted to see it but if I remember correctly it was another hot summer day and I was coming home from somewhere else, again enjoying the back roads. I didn’t stop then but I knew I had to today. Something there was calling me. So I parked badly on the little grass hill in front of the cemetery and headed in with my camera.
The cemetery is located at a fork in the road. There was traffic going by but I have no idea where they were going. This place was sparsely inhabited. Still, the two cars that drove by slowed down to see what crazy person was out here, alone, in an old cemetery in the woods.
For some reason I was being drawn to the back right corner exactly the opposite of where I parked. I passed by an old crypt, took a quick shot, and then noticed something very odd. Here sitting quietly in the shade were two of the most unusual stones I had ever seen in New England. In fact they weren’t stones at all. One was a wooden cross with another chunk of wood sitting at its base, the appropriate details burned into it and laying atop a circle of random rocks. It was a burial that wouldn’t look out of place in the Old West but here in New England it was odd. Even weirder still was the plot next to it which held no cross, just a lump of wood, again with all the usual data seared into it. This was the first time I’d seen a wooden memorial. It seemed so… impermanent. Was that the point? To be remembered and then forgotten entirely once living memory was lost? A dead bird sat in front of them, perhaps left by a cat. It was a bit eerie, certainly the first time I’ve found a headless animal sitting atop a grave.
I couldn’t stop staring at the memorial. The more I looked the more weird details came to the surface. There was a tiny purse hanging from the cross. Why? This was the last resting place of a man. Was it left by an old girlfriend? I don’t know why but I was very saddened by this particular plot. Whoever was here was young when he died – too young. And it was recently. Only 2015. The epitaph read, “Live life real.” I could have seen him alive and never have known it. And the plot next to him read “matriarch” and was only three years later. Was that his mother? Did she die from a broken heart? My own grandmother outlived two of her five children who died in adulthood and… she was never the same.
I sat staring at these two plots for quite a while. So many questions. There were a lot of other Stebbins here. Clearly the family has been buried here for a long time – but they all got stones. It’s odd. The purse seemed to hint someone was still around who cared. Who visited. But the fact that the marker was so… cheaply made and impermanent just didn’t settle right with me. I wondered if they couldn’t afford a stone. It happens sometimes. I looked them up when I got home but none of my questions were answered. If anything their obituaries just brought up more mystery. I eventually pulled myself away.
Not to far away in the same back row another stone caught my eye. It looked pretty typical until you looked closer at it and realized instead of any of the usual motifs it was a hammer with angel wings and an odd inscription, “In peace, through work; joy” And then I realized this was another person who died young. This just made me wonder more. However this person had literally no traces online having died in 1977. So recently and yet not enough.
By now I was feeling pretty strange. Usually as I walk through rows of stones I do have curiosity but this odd sense of being pulled, this mystery, and the overall sadness was new. I don’t know what or who was there but I don’t think I was alone. I wandered through some of the older markers and made note of some of the prose. One was short and cryptic, “Death sure will come, the time unknown.” That is certainly true of Alonzo Granger who “..died from shock from railway accident when his chest was crushed and his feet were cut off.” Brutal. This mixed with my previous experience here today just made me feel like what I was doing right now – living my life to its fullest, exploring, traveling, learning, meeting new people, it’s all the right thing to be doing. I had a moment of gratitude before I finally left and decided to call it a day. I shall be back to this area. It was far to beautiful and poetic to leave behind forever.
I had already been enjoying a long ride down so many dirt roads, passing old farms, camps, and artist houses, interspersed through miles and miles of trees. It was gorgeous. And I was feeling totally refreshed from my stop at Guaco Pond. A little stop in a cemetery to stretch my legs seemed appropriate. So when I found a quaint little gathering of stones I parked my car and went to explore.
This cemetery was odd in its placement. Although I had traveled on some very rural roads to get here it seemed to be nestled in a little neighborhood of sorts. A house sat to one side, another across the street. People passing by seemed curious who it was in the cemetery. This place was just large enough to be a proper cemetery but not large enough to rule out being some sort of private family plot which are scattered throughout New England. Granted it seemed very well kept. A little stone staircase led into it. As was usual it was surrounded on all sides by a stone wall.
Of course it was the slate stones that drew me to them first, settled to the back left hand side. Most of these stones seemed in remarkable condition. They were legible and groomed although one was broken in half and set against the stone wall, a few others had fallen on their back. I am always happy to see the rough backs of older stones which apparently didn’t have the need to grind smooth the ridges made from quarrying the raw slate.
I found a marble stone from 1879 which had the most unusual name: Dedidamia Bradley Shaw. Died April 20th 1879, aged 80. A remarkable age and a strange name. I looked her up when I got home but she wasn’t in any records online. In fact she wasn’t even listed on Find A Grave which makes me suspect this cemetery has not been archived. Sooooo…. if you’re looking for this long lost relative, good news! I found her! Otherwise this was an odd footnote. It always makes me a bit sad when I find something unusual and then can’t find any more information on it. Clearly this woman led a long life, she must have made her mark somehow… and yet she’s completely forgotten to history. It’s a solemn thought.
Even more curious was a modern stone – seemingly the only one dated 2002. That of Reverend Wilton Edson Cross and his wife Rosella M Cross Bemis. Judging by the name change I think she must have gotten remarried. Oof. Must be weird to be buried next to your ex husband after you’ve remarried… In any event it was time to go back to the car and go to my next destination the Federated Women’s Club State Forest.
Today I wanted to go exploring in the Petersham area because I don’t know it very well but the few times I have been through it seemed like a gorgeous local. So I packed up the car and hit the road not having the foggiest idea where I’d end up. I drove to Main Street in Petersham just so I’d have some direction and ended up taking a right at the church onto West Street which is how I came across the West Street Cemetery.
It was a small cemetery with a few older stones in the back so I figured I’d check it out and see if there was anything interesting. Years ago I know I helped archive a cemetery nearby although it wasn’t this one. I was delighted to find that in the very back of the cemetery there was evidence someone else was doing similar work – one of the stones had sunken in the ground making the prose at the bottom unreadable but someone had tried to dig some of it up. The stone was of Fanny Hildreth and was ornately carved and made from marble unlike surrounding stones. I never figured out why.
I’m happy to note that according to Find a Grave 97% of this cemetery has been photographed and it appears to be thoroughly archived. I did not come across any stones with pennies on them and I didn’t see any stones that alerted my curiosity further but it was still a sweet little resting place out in the woods for a lot of the oldest families in this town. There was at least one revolutionary war soldier (Moses Sanderson) who served a month in Connecticut.
This cemetery had a few of the old slate stones I adore so much. The prose was as beautiful and at times humbling as I expect these things to be. I noticed a great deal of them had the same carvings as other cemeteries I’d been to which usually means the stones were ordered from carvers in Boston Massachusetts rather than created nearby. I was however pleasantly surprised to find a new design I’d never seen before on two stones, both of children. I do not know its significance, if any.
This is the first of three cemeteries I randomly visited today (including the Northwest Cemetery and the South Cemetery) but first I visited a nice fishing hole and a hiking trail in the middle of nowhere. As such this was a great start to my day.
So today I actually did some research before bumbling into the woods in 84 degree weather. I looked up the trailhead I had passed on my way to Sarah’s Hat Boxes the other day and low and behold it actually sounded pretty interesting. The property the trail runs through used to be an old farm in the late 1800’s on and there were a few whispered rumors about there being ruins of the old farm still on the property. What kind of ruins? It didn’t say but I was picturing maybe some old farmhouse foundation or something. I’m all into that.
There was a hitch though. My mother was on her way out and currently I have been sharing her car. Suffice to say both her and her friend ended up coming with me in the dastardly muggy heat but that’s OK because I also read this was an easy .9 mile hike through the shade of many trees. Doable.
The trailhead sits right off route 123 a few miles past the center of Hancock. There’s a little bit of space for parking which is easy to find because of the sign reading Welch’s Family Farm & Forest. The path itself has a gate across it.
My first impression was this place was not frequented by too many people. The path was very wide but grass was growing over most of it. It was forested at first but gave way eventually to a scene of rolling unmanicured pastures framed by the mountains in the background. My mother was thrilled as this reminded her of the paths she rambled down as a youth. Luckily it was an easy trail with gentle slopes and inclines here and there.
We came to a ruin of a sort – an old hay machine. It was hard to date it exactly but it was neither very old nor particularly modern. It was however sitting upright and well rusted. Also on the trail I found evidence of owls (owl pellets were spat on the ground at one point) and what I think was fox or coyote scat. Someone also had taken a turkey feather and poked it into a tree stump. Clearly this place was alive with wildlife. It was said to be a great place to see a bobcat in the winter. Also I fully expected to run into a flooded trail as beavers were said to be constantly washing it out with their activities.
We walked about 3/4ths of a mile before we passed a sign on the opposite side of the trail marking a property boundary. We had gone from being on a completely unmarked trail to the red trail. We then walked to the .9 mile we had been promised. By now we seemed to be walking past a more active looking pasture with what seemed to be an access road in the background. A sign read, “Red trail exit” and gave a two way arrow. We decided to head back rather than go to the end. I didn’t see any ruins, only whispers of wildlife, and no water or beavers. Maybe they were on one or more of the trails that jutted off of this one. Who knows. All and all I wouldn’t really recommend this path unless you’re looking for something easy and happen to live in the area. It was pleasant but pretty boring. There was however more stone walls than I could count so it might be a nice slice of New England scenery for someone who doesn’t live here as well.
