Hartford
“Right now I don’t believe there is anybody who actually goes out, other than myself, and looks at things carefully and sees things that need to be done,” said West Hartford resident Art Peale, who the town has paid about $2,400 annually to repair its broken tombstones for the past 10 years.
Peale recently discovered a badly damaged tombstone in Center of Town Cemetery, among a cluster of stones dedicated to the Shallies family.
“The whole front of the stone had sheared off years ago,” Peale said. “I have to say that it was in a lot of pieces and it didn’t do it by itself. I don’t know how else it would have been done other than lawnmowers running across the top of it.”
Peale gathered up the remnants of the tombstone and took it home to his garage, where he does much of his work. He almost immediately noticed a distinctive carving near the top of the stone — a round, cartoonish face, almost like a child’s drawing of a ghost, with a bulbous nose and teeth, and wings.
“It’s very beautiful stuff,” Peale said.
Peale recognized it as the work of Gershom Bartlett, a stonecutter and Revolutionary War veteran who moved to Vermont from Connecticut and carved hundreds of gravestones before his death in 1798, according to the historical society of Columbia, Conn.
“He himself is buried up in Norwich cemetery,” Peale said.
Peale began working on the pieces of slate, about a dozen of them, many of them worn and some no more than 3 inches long.
“It was the most challenging one I’ve done,” he said.
Peale, whose one-man company, Gardens of Stone, cleans and repairs tombstones, says he doesn’t need any more repair work. He’d much rather see the stones not get broken in the first place.
Roughly 30 percent of the tombstones stand beneath the branches of the trees that ring the small Center of Town cemetery, off Center of Town Road, not far from the Quechee interchange with Interstate 89. Just a few yards from the Bartlett tombstone, a limb fell from a dead tree, breaking two other tombstones. Others are getting ruined by lawnmowers.
Tad Nunez, director of Hartford’s Parks and Recreation Department, said many of the municipal cemeteries are mowed by inmates under a contract with the state Department of Corrections.
He said that mowing the grass in a way that doesn’t harm the tombstones is detail-oriented, often painstaking work. When he hears about damage, or a case of a lawnmower inadvertently spraying a grave with grass clippings, he said he talks to the crew.
“I’ll say, ‘Guys, these stones have real feelings,’ ” he said.
Peale approached the Hartford Historic Preservation Commission in May and told officials that if the cemeteries had more oversight, the trees planted in and around their borders could be managed in a way that would prevent some of the damage.
That call was heard, and repeated, by Selectman Dennis Brown, who made a presentation to the Selectboard in June; Town Manager Leo Pullar said Friday that he is crafting a proposal for a response that he will present to the Selectboard soon.
Peale and Nunez agree that part of the problem is that the responsibility of managing the cemeteries has been as fragmented as a shattered tombstone.
“Currently, there’s no one really looking over it all,” Brown said. “That’s the problem.”
Peale does some of the mowing, but Parks and Recreation does the bulk of it, delegating some of the work to the corrections department work crew.
The falling tree limbs are a concern for the Department of Public Works, the Hartford Tree Board, and the Hartford tree warden, but both of those entities have limited resources that typically are tied up in addressing tree branches that threaten the living.
Other groups, like the Hartford Historic Preservation Commission and the Hartford Historical Society, take an interest in the cemeteries as places of historical value, but they don’t actively manage them.
“If a town values their history, they value their cemeteries,” said Tom Giffin, president of the Vermont Old Cemeteries Association. Giffin said Hartford is not alone in struggling to maintain its cemeteries.
“There are over 1,900 cemeteries in Vermont,” he said. “Many are facing many of these issues — marble becoming porous from acid rain, lawnmowers and weedwhackers, vandalism or just general neglect.”
Giffin said the problem of neglected cemeteries has become much more prevalent in recent decades.
“In the old days, you’d have generations of people, descendants, looking after their gravestones,” he said. “Now, the population is becoming very mobile.”
Whit Mowrey, a Hartland resident and VOCA’s assistant treasurer, said towns are encouraged to apply to the organization for cemetery care grants; the group gives out four or five grants a year of up to $700 each, he said.
State law requires that Selectboards be responsible for their cemeteries, in towns without designated cemetery commissioners, but the Hartford Selectboard hasn’t taken an active role in the properties in recent years.
The money the town spends on Peale’s services — $2,400 — is significantly above the minimum $500 mandated by state law.
Brown said that active upkeep of the cemeteries could result in a cost savings.
“We’re spending money to repair stuff that we could avoid by tree work,” he said.
Pullar, Hartford’s new town manager, said that whatever solution he presents to address the crumbling headstones will be subject to the same cost pressures facing the entire town.
“My goal is, as I build the budget, to identify what are the real requirements in this town?” he said. “That’s something we have to be methodical about. Cemeteries are going to come into those discussions. Tree removal and pruning is going to come up in that discussion. We have to weigh all that against a fiscally constrained environment.”
Pullar said he was committed to some sort of action.
“We can’t do nothing,” he said. “We have to see how we can be creative.”
Brown and Peale said they’d like to see the efforts of all of the various entities involved with the cemeteries brought together and coordinated.
One option they’ve suggested is the founding of a cemetery commission.
Under state law, Selectboards are allowed to designate responsibility for cemeteries to such groups, which must be comprised of three or five publicly elected commissioners serving staggered terms.
“I think that’s the best way to address cemeteries,” Mowrey said. “They’re not distracted by other parts of the town operation.”
Nunez agreed that some sort of group, be it elected or a panel of stakeholders, is needed.
“I would welcome it in a heartbeat,” he said. “We need some type of oversight group.”
Peale said that there are tombstones in all of the town’s cemeteries that could use help.
Simonds Cemetery on Old Kings Highway, an ancient family cemetery, has been so overgrown with forest that it’s barely accessible.
Peale said the town acquired it in 1823 and forgot about it until he discovered it and pointed it out a few years ago.
There’s Russtown Cemetery on Route 5, and Delano Savage Cemetery on Jericho Street.
Tucker Cemetery on Route 14 was what Peale called a “pauper’s cemetery,” associated with a “poor farm” that has long since disappeared from the site.
They all have damaged tombstones that Peale someday would like to get to.
As he pieced together the fragmented Bartlett stone, he was able to match up most of the lettering, applying a specialized epoxy, trying to work with the surfaces that had been worn away with time.
After an estimated six hours of work, the name of the person who had been buried beneath the stone was clear.
It belonged to Molley Shallies, who, according to the stone, was the daughter of Joseph Shallies, and who died in March of 1790. Peale has returned the weathered stone, repaired as best he could, to its rightful spot in the cemetery, which remains ringed by trees.
Molley’s epitaph is two-thirds of the way down the stone, and begins, “Why do you mourn departed.”
The rest has already been lost.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.