Listening To The Stories Of Newtown’s Silent Tombstones

By Kaaren Valenta

“Stranger stop and cast an eye,

As you are now, so once was I,

As I am now, so shall you be,

So be prepared to follow me.”

Tombstones tell stories and those in the Newtown Village Cemetery are no exceptions.

Whether it is the epitaph, the calligraphy, the decorative carving, or the material used in the headstone itself, there is much to learn beyond the name and the history of the person whose remains rest below.

Town Historian Daniel Cruson has spent years engrossed in the fascinating view of history that cemeteries have to tell. On a recent Sunday he led a reprise of his popular tour through the Village Cemetery, which sits adjacent to the Ram Pasture.

It was an hour-long tour, just long enough to touch on some of the town’s notables and the evolution of the cemetery from its beginnings in the 1700s, to give participants a taste of what they could uncover later on a more leisurely walk.

Several dozen people met inside the front gates at the large holding vault constructed in 1924 by funds given by town benefactor Mary Hawley in memory of her parents, Marcus Clinton Hawley and Sarah Booth Hawley.

Mr Cruson led the group up the hills behind the gatehouse, pointing out graves that had both headstones and footstones.

“They were placed six feet apart,” Mr Cruson said. “Over the years they often were moved –– because the footstones were easy to knock over and hard to mow around –– with the footstones winding up next to the headstones. The dead were buried facing East so they would be standing on their feet when Christ appears in the Second Coming. ”

Early carvings on headstones often showed the skull of death. Fashions changed and stones featuring cherubs became popular by about the 1760s in this part of Connecticut.

“These weren’t a violation of the commandment about graven images,” Mr Cruson said. “In those years people did not bury out of the church. They were buried out of the home, laid out on mourning benches. Funerals were considered to be completely secular.”

Mr Cruson pointed out that in the late author Howard Fast’s book, April Morning, when the dead soldiers were laid out in the church, this scene was contradictory to the actual practice of the time.

“Howard Fast did not understand the tradition of the time,” he explained. “The dead would not have been brought to the church.”

About 1800 weeping willows and Greek urns became the fashion in tombstone design. Later, an Egyptian theme became the craze in both home decoration and in cemeteries. By studying the designs and calligraphy, it is possible to identify the carvers who worked in southwestern Connecticut, Mr Cruson said.

“The 1880s marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when carvers started to use tools like the pentagraph to make and carve their designs,” he said. “Stones became very uniform.”

Some of the older brownstone, sandstone, and marble stones in the Village Cemetery are crumbling, a victim of a chemical reaction between components in the stone and ordinary rainwater. Rainwater also gets into small fissures in the stone, freezes in the cold winter months, expands, and causes large cracks.

“Normal rainwater dissolves them in about a century,” Mr Cruson said. “Granite lasts much longer.”

Sometimes vandalism also is to blame for the deterioration of headstones.

“I photographed the gravestone of David Judson, a pastor of the Congregational Church who died in 1776 after visiting troops along the coast who had smallpox,” Mr Cruson said. “Later I came back and the tombstone had been damaged in three places, obviously by someone with a sledgehammer.

“This type of 18th Century folk art is very important and cannot be replaced.”

Mr Cruson pointed out the earliest graves, which date back to 1745, then moved to the grave of Ezra Johnson, Newtown’s first historian. He passed the grave of Catherine Camp, who moved “to the wilderness,” writing seven letters about her experiences, then came back to Newtown two years before she died of consumption (tuberculosis).

“Consumption was the biggest killer of the 19th Century,” Mr Cruson said.

At the far so.uthern end of the cemetery, almost in the treeline, is the elaborate eight-foot-high metal tombstone that was erected by the townspeople at the turn of the 20th Century for Alfred Jefferson Briscoe, a mentally handicapped black man who for years drove a horse-drawn surrey to transport visitors from the train station on Church Hill Road to a hotel on Main Street.

The train station closed, the hotel burned down, but the tombstone remains to immortalize a man who was loved by the town.

Alfred Briscoe was the grandson of a freed slave who took the Briscoe name from his owner, Lt Nathaniel Briscoe, who was among the small group of men and their families that founded Newtown. Alfred, or Jeff as he was more popularly known, apparently was mildly retarded, although capable of making a modest living for himself. Beginning in 1892, he worked full-time at the Grand Central Hotel (known as the Yankee Drover when it burned down in the early 1980s).

 A member of Hook and Ladder Fire Company, Mr Briscoe was very popular and is the only black man who has a biographical entry in the Commemorative Biographical Record of Fairfield County published in 1899. He died at age 65 in October of 1898 with no estate so a collection was taken up by the town to provide for the headstone, which also bears an inscription for his parents, Thomas and Betsey Briscoe.

“He was the only black man ever to have his obituary on the front page of The Bee,” Mr Cruson said.

Walking up the hill, past graves enclosed in family compounds, Mr Cruson stopped at the imposing tombstone of Mary Hawley.

“She owned the Ram Pasture and was planning to turn it into a large rose garden,” Mr Cruson said. “But [the Ram Pasture] wasn’t in her will when she died, so it became the property of Yale University. Eventually Yale offered it to the town, which couldn’t make up its mind, so the Village Cemetery Association stepped forward and agreed to take it.”

For Mr Cruson, the walk only began to touch on the town’s history.

“We came into the cemetery at Johnson and go out at Hawley,” Mr Cruson said. “The rest is here for you to discover.”