Newtown, Communities Across America

Grappling With Forsaken Cemeteries

By John Voket

Almost 125 years ago, 15-month-old Emma Wheeler was laid to rest within sight of her family’s church near a stone wall in a New England cemetery.

The church is now long gone, and the cemetery is abandoned. Over time, the toddler’s grave and the rest of the Montville burial grounds became obscured by shoulder-high branches, brambles, and fern fronds.

It is a scene mirrored at an untold number of abandoned cemeteries nationwide, leaving state and local governments, including Newtown, under pressure to clean up the burial grounds out of respect for the dead —without imposing more costs on the living.

Last year, Connecticut joined a number of states that have enacted laws that let towns acquire abandoned cemeteries if they cannot find the legal owners or heirs and if no burials have taken place for generations. But the new law only allows for the acquisitions and cleanups.

It does not require towns to do so or allocate any money to pay for the work.

In Newtown, however, the apparently defunct associations that formerly tended a Sandy Hook graveyard on Riverside Road, as well as small graveyards in Botsford and Dodgingtown have left modest legacies in the form of maintenance accounts held in reserve by the town.

First Selectman Pat Llodra hopes there are surviving members of these associations who might be willing to reactivate the organizations — if for nothing more than to oversee their care under a possible cooperative that would pool resources to ensure the upkeep of all three parcels at minimal cost.

Mrs Llodra said that the Zoar Cemetery Association, which meticulously maintains its Berkshire Road graveyard, is a shining example of what she hopes to see for the town’s other forsaken, centuries-old cemeteries. (In a previous report, Zoar Cemetery was incorrectly listed among those lacking an active association.)

Officials in many states share Mrs Llodra’s frustration over locating association representatives or their survivors. And many community leaders say it has proven nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly how many abandoned burial grounds exist, much less find the legal owners or shoulder the cost of cleaning them up.

Part of the reason: Cemeteries were not on tax rolls, so there was little impetus for governments to track their ownership.

Farmstead Burial Grounds

Many abandoned cemeteries are the remnants of family farmstead burial grounds. Some were burial grounds for slaves and their descendants, who were segregated from whites even in death.

Others are former churchyards abandoned when the churches disbanded or the last sexton died. Some were in frontier territories that were left behind as pioneers moved on.

In Florida, a legislative task force said some counties have more than 100 abandoned cemeteries each, and that thousands of other lost burial grounds probably remain undiscovered.

Researchers a few decades ago estimated that North Carolina had at least 10,000 abandoned cemeteries — a figure that some researchers now think is too low, given the longtime Southern tradition of being buried on the family homestead.

“Especially with the new mobility in the South after World War II, people moved away and there often would be nobody left to take care of the family graves,” said John Clauser, a former archaeologist for the state of North Carolina. “The holly takes over, the yucca starts running wild. Within a few decades, there’d be just about no sign to the casual observer that the graves were there.”

Mr Clauser’s Raleigh-based consulting business, Of Grave Concerns, helps landowners restore or move cemeteries discovered on their property. It is not a rare thing, he said, especially when corporations buy large parcels and discover a cluster of graves on what they thought was just a patch of undeveloped land.

Grave Concerns

The cost to restore or remove found cemeteries varies, depending on number of plots, the condition of markers, the type of terrain and whether remains need to be moved.

Connecticut’s law, which went into effect last fall, lets municipalities take over abandoned cemeteries if no burials have taken place and no plots have been sold in at least 40 years. The cemetery also must have been left without maintenance for at least ten years, and either the owner cannot be found or does not object to giving up the site.

Michele Pedro, who has explored the remnants of the Montville burial ground in search of her husband’s ancestors, pressed town officials to restore it, resulting in a volunteer cleanup event.

But that is just a temporary fix.

In Newtown, the first selectman would welcome any civic group or organization acquiring the rights to maintain one, two, or all three apparently abandoned town graveyards.

“It’s not that the town wouldn’t or couldn’t continue the occasional maintenance we’ve been doing for years in some cases, but the level of interest and TLC is always much greater when an association or adoptive organizations are involved,” Mrs Llodra said.

The Newtown situation came to light following a request by a local Eagle Scout candidate who expressed interest in renovating and sprucing up the Sandy Hook graveyard. And a handful of inquiries later, all Mrs Llodra’s calls about where to refer the enterprising scout went unanswered.

“If no association members are traceable, the town may have to initiate a process of finding other entities to pick up the maintenance duties,” the first selectman told The Bee. Her first choice of candidates for that transfer of duties would be another active cemetery group, or possibly the Newtown Historical Society.

(Associated Press content by Stephanie Reitz was used in this report.)