WINDSOR — Tucked behind a Windsor neighborhood and marked only by a small green-and-white sign sits a nearly 60-acre expanse of the state’s incarceration history going back 150 years.
In the shadow of a forested band of pines at the back of Ascutney Cemetery stand four rows of painted white wooden crosses with small black nameplates. Each bears the name of a person who died while incarcerated in a Vermont prison, and whose body went unclaimed by their family or next of kin.
“There’s a certain sadness to it in a way, that nobody cared and that’s why they wound up here,” Mike Coxon, a former superintendent at Southeast State Correctional Facility, said in a 1993 interview with the Burlington Free Press.
Although Windsor’s last prison closed in 2017, the Department of Corrections continues to own and maintain the burial lot at Ascutney Cemetery, where 42 marked plots hold the remains of people who died in state custody. Now, the department is working to correct errors in burial records and plans to replace the deteriorating wooden crosses with permanent gravestones.
The most recent burial in Ascutney Cemetery took place last year. Gregory Penn had been receiving palliative care at Southern State Correctional Facility and was serving a sentence of 40 years to life when he died at age 68.
His is one of only two newer stone markers in a field of painted crosses, some of which are cracked or rotten in places.
Many existing markers have errors in dates or misspelled names due to inconsistent record-keeping practices, something Joshua Rutherford, deputy director for the facilities division of the Department of Corrections, has been working to correct using the department’s Offender Management System database.
“I’ve arranged the last two burials there, and then I’ve been trying to catch up and correct some of the records,” he said.
The state asks people who are incarcerated about their end-of-life plans, particularly older people serving long sentences and those who may have medical issues. Most deaths occur at Southern State Correctional Facility in nearby Springfield, Rutherford said, which houses the department’s elderly and infirm population.
“[We] have those conversations with them in advance,” Rutherford said. “‘Who do you want us to call? Who might be willing to claim your body? Where would you like it to go?’ Those sorts of things.”
In cases where nobody steps forward, the department needs a process to bury a person in a manner that is “respectful and appropriate,” Rutherford said. The prison plot in Ascutney Cemetery is considered the place of last resort for people who die in Vermont’s prisons.
“It’s been that way for well over 100 years now,” he said.
A final resting place
The lot itself was purchased by the directors of the former maximum security state prison in Windsor in 1875, according to a note published in the Vermont Watchman that year:
“The old graveyard within the walls of the prison being a scandal, having been dug over and over again, they bought a lot in the town cemetery, and the prisoners now have decent burial, much to their satisfaction; for even convicts have some human feelings, and like to think that they will have a Christian burial when they die.”
The cemetery’s relationship with Windsor’s prisons extended well beyond burials. For decades, people serving sentences at Southeast State Correctional Facility, the prison farm in Windsor, maintained the grounds.
Mike Coxon grew up across the street from the former maximum security state prison in Windsor where his father worked and where, in the prison yard surrounded by high walls, the first people who died while incarcerated were buried.
Coxon went on to work at the prison himself until it closed in 1975, and served as superintendent at Southeast State Correctional Facility until he retired from the department in 2002.
“We had a lot of workers. We were literally doing maybe $60,000 worth of work for the town, and for free,” Coxon said. “We did the cemetery. We painted the high school. We built the docks for the swimming area.
“You name it, we did it.”
The Southeast State work crews typically consisted of older people serving long sentences, Coxon said, since they were less likely to cause problems for supervising officers. People could work at their own pace under guard supervision and didn’t have a quota to meet like they would working in the sign shop or printing license plates.
Coxon would go out and observe the men as they worked, some of whom hadn’t had a personal visitor in 10 years.
“Often, they said that they were doing something very useful,” Coxon said. “You don’t see the usefulness on the license plates or the road signs or the printing.”
Logging trees, clearing brush and mowing grass at the cemetery gave the men a chance to get outside and offered a change of pace for the older people who were incarcerated.
“It broke it up a lot just being out,” Coxon said, for both the men on the crew and those who guarded them. One longtime work crew supervisor, Dave Bellini, was said to have “done 30 years sitting in the pickup truck.”
Tom Gillam is the cemetery commissioner for the city of Rutland and has some experience with burials of people who died while incarcerated. He worked to revitalize a former House of Corrections burial plot in Rutland from the turn of the last century that was abandoned by the state.
Gillam recalled that the grounds in Ascutney Cemetery benefited from Coxon’s attention during his years at Southeast State.
“But Mike Coxon took a lot of pride in the cemetery when he was superintendent. It was maintained very well,” Gillam said.
Coxon also knew several of the people who are now buried in Ascutney Cemetery, and made attempts to contact their families when the men died while in prison. Some families declined to accept responsibility for their remains. Other people who were incarcerated had very little connection to the outside world, with no kin to contact.
“We asked him for a list of people we could contact,” Coxon said of one man, Stanley Bentley, who had been convicted of child molestation and died of cancer in 1992. “It was very strange. He gave us some names. Fictitious,” said Coxon. “We didn’t even have his right Social Security number.”
Coxon would go through the phone book in search of the deceased’s relatives or post obituaries in the newspaper, sometimes reaching family members who had long since lost contact.
“We did reach a couple of families,” Coxon said. “They said, ‘Oh, that’s my great uncle.’ That’s it. They weren’t ashamed. They just said, ‘We don’t — we don’t have any contact.”
The cemetery also became a place where Windsor schoolchildren encountered the town’s incarceration history.
Michael Quinn taught science at Harford Middle School in the 80s and brought his eighth-grade class to Ascutney Cemetery in October each year. The prison lot was always a draw for them, Quinn said.
“There was a fence around it at the time, so they had a lot of questions about why those graves were made separate from the rest,” he said.
Quinn told the class about the lot’s history and gave them context for class discussions.
One student, Quinn said, lingered among the crosses with her hood up and her back to the group instead of joining the class on the bus when it was time to leave.
“She’s standing there, and she’s looking down, not moving. It was not like her,” Quinn said. When he approached, the student was in tears.
“She told me then — and later, in her writing — that she was adopted, and she realized that she had something in common with these inmates. They both were abandoned,” Quinn said. “This perfect kid who should have come just like that was held in place by the draw of being among the abandoned. I’ll never forget that.”
Permanent record, etched in stone
The fence that once stood to segregate the burials of people who had been incarcerated from the rest of the dead is now long gone.
Work crews from Windsor stopped mowing in Ascutney Cemetery when the prison closed in 2017. The department also paused its statewide work programs during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading other cemeteries, such as Montpelier’s 35-acre Green Mount Cemetery, to let grass grow wild.
In 2023, the Department of Corrections fully ended its “community restitution program” across the state. No more work crews come to the cemetery, but the burials continue to connect Windsor to people who die in state custody and whose remains go unclaimed.
“The last time I saw it was wooden crosses,” said Tom Gillam, who is also the president of the Vermont Old Cemetery Association. He sees cemeteries as “cultural geography,” and emphasized the historical importance of a permanent marker. “Even a field stone — something — just to say that these people once existed.”
At Ascutney Cemetery, Rutherford said that as budget and time allow, the wooden crosses will all eventually be replaced with permanent gravestones, which are less prone to decay and information loss.
“1875 and 2026 are very different time frames, and the assumption that, you know, everyone wants or even desires a Christian burial, whatever that may mean, is less current now than it would have been then,” Rutherford said.
The replacement markers would also eliminate the religious symbolism that has marked the graves since the state first purchased the lot more than a century ago.
“The opportunity, at the same time, to move to something non-denominational, recognizing that not everyone we bury may be Christian or may be practicing at all, just seems more respectful in this day and age.”