First Part Of Two-Stage Project Completed—

Paying Respect, With Much-Needed Repairs,

To Past Generations At Village Cemetery

By Shannon Hicks

Peck. Beers. Glover. Booth. Hawley. Northrop.

All of these names represent families who have been pillars of the community. They are all recognizable names from Newtown history.

Unfortunately, the pillars of stone that have been left to honor these people and hundreds of others in Village Cemetery have not always been as durable as family members would hope. Time and elements — even vandals in some cases — make it necessary for someone to care for the stones placed as monuments to men, women and children of past generations.

Jonathan Appell spent July working in Newtown’s oldest cemetery, making repairs to monuments that needed his expertise. In just over a month, the West Hartford resident was able to repair three dozen stones. It was his first time working in the cemetery that runs along Elm Drive and Deep Brook Road.

“It’s the first time anyone has been here, as far as I could tell,” he said a few weeks ago, looking over the dozens of stones that still need repairs. Mr Appell has completed the first of two stages of work that he will be undertaking in the cemetery off Elm Drive.

Thanks to a referral from Ruth Shapleigh-Brown, the executive director of Connecticut Gravestone Network, Village Cemetery Association was able to find a professional with strong references when its members decided to hire someone to do this much-needed repair work. The association provides for the care of the 25-acre cemetery in addition to owning and maintaining the adjacent Ram Pasture.

Maureen Crick Owen, the president of Village Cemetery Association, was very pleased with Mr Appell’s work.

“What he does is, he takes a before and after picture and then he submits a bound-cover book with all these photos, when he’s finished with a project,” Ms Owen said. “So we have, one, documented information on what he’s done, and second, a visual record of what is in the cemetery.”

Mr Appell uses similar bound volumes when making a proposal for a new job.

“I was very impressed with his professionalism,” said Ms Owen. “He’s been a wealth of knowledge.

“I had a chance to talk with him while he was working and he’s fascinating to talk to. He obviously loves his job. He’s been very helpful with suggestions for the cemetery’s future and he’s very, very interesting to listen to.”

Mr Appell has been cleaning and repairing gravestones since 1987. He has worked exclusively on historic stones since 1999.

Until 1987 Mr Appell worked as a monument installer, which was how he began to learn his current trade.

“Because I was in a business related to gravestones, I would receive calls from people looking for help,” he said recently. “These was a niche that I saw as needing to be filled — someone needed to take care of the gravestones.”

He sees his job as a combination of many different disciplines. There are elements of masonry, of course, but also curatorial touches and pieces of archaeology and geology in his job description.

In addition to the repair work, Mr Appell shares his trade through workshops and seminars. He recently presented a one-day program in Plainfield, Mass., and did another in Cheyenne, Wyo. His calendar is already filled with planned presentations in Washington, D.C., and Boston, among other locations, and he will be attending a training workshop in Greensboro, N.C.

While working in Newtown last month, Mr Appell was told by the cemetery association to work on the stones of his choosing from more than 60 they wanted to be repaired eventually. He concentrated his efforts, he said, on the stones that were the most unstable. Wind and rain had eroded the ground underneath many stones, leaving unstable dirt that eventually resulted in the toppling of historic memorials.

A portable tent provided a small area of shade while he worked, but the back-breaking, muscle-building work was not made much easier due to the few square feet of shade. Using a system of chains and pulleys, Mr Appell was able to work alone to upright stones that had fallen onto the ground. Some were able to be set back into notches that had been carved into their bases, but most needed to be reattached to their bases using a stone epoxy and monument setting compound. Occasionally Mr Appell will use a drill and pins to reattach a stone to its base, but that is not his favored route.

“Doing that can sometimes damage a stone even more than it had been before you started,” he said.

Once uprighted, most of the stones that had fallen needed to be carefully cleaned so that their inscriptions could be read once again. Other stones, still upright, also needed careful cleaning.

Many of the stones Mr Appell found in Village Cemetery were carved marble, which was fashionable at the end of the Victorian era.

Unfortunately, marble does not weather well. Once weathered, Mr Appell says on his website (GravestonePreservation.info), marble stones become hard to read. Their surfaces tend to become pitted. Also, moss and lichens attach themselves to stones and excrete and acid that attacks the stones. During the Victorian era, however, marble was sold as being a permanent material, Mr Appell said.

“It was the fashionable thing to have then. People used marble by choice,” he said. “It’s use wasn’t fully understood, and acid rain wasn’t yet understood. Acid rain just sets off a process that disintegrates marble.”

Newer monuments were made of granite, which Mr Appell described as “more impervious to most elements.”

Village Cemetery’s primary placement on a hill is a leading impediment to any of the monuments, regardless of the material from which they are created.

“Erosion causes a situation where stones lean more and more. They can break, or fall and his another stone and break both perhaps,” he said, pointing across the large expanse of hill that the majority of the town’s cemetery rests on.

Setting stones into a hill only exacerbates the erosion process because the water rolling down the hill becomes trapped behind a stone. Unless the sun evaporates it, water will soak into the ground behind and under the stone, weakening its foundation.

While there was much work waiting for Mr Appell when he arrived in town earlier this summer, the good news is that much of it was not caused by misguided pranksters. Erosion, not vandalism, Mr Appell said, is the reason most of the stones have fallen over at Village Cemetery.

“Most of these [fallen stones] are not the work of vandals,” he said. “You can tell by looking at their base. Is it heaved? That’s what causes a stone to fall on its own.

“Maybe a few stones in here have been vandalized, but most have fallen only to the elements.”

Finding Hidden Treasure

Occasionally working in a cemetery provides a result that can only be described as rewarding. Mr Appell called the results of his work on one particular pair of Village Cemetery monuments “as good as finding hidden treasure.”

A pair of stones located near the front of the cemetery — in the Clarke family plot, near the iron gates that run along Deep Brook Road — had toppled an unknown number of years ago. The nearly square monuments — large granite stones — were pushed over at some point, he believed, by erosion.

“They may have had poor foundations,” he offered.

“These stones are just beautiful,” he continued, pointing out areas of extremely detailed carving. “Look at their condition. The amount of labor that went into these. Look at the carving — it’s all hand done.”

The two large stones were the footstones for multiple members of the family. Each measures approximately two feet wide by three feet tall by about one foot deep. Using an intricate font style, the top of one stone has the words “Our Children” carved in relief (set so that the words appear to be above the surface of the stone, rather than carved into the stone, or inscribed) while the second stone has the words “Husband Wife.” The front of each stone — which had been face-down in the ground when Mr Appell found them — has a detailed scroll carved as relief and a relief flower to one side of the scroll.

The children’s stone was created for Mattie Eugenie Clarke and Edwin Parker Clarke. The second stone was done to honor Edwin Clarke and Mattie A. Parker, presumably the parents of Mattie and Edwin. The stones are magnificent, to say the least, and show careful planning by the family members who purchased them and first-rate work by the carver.

“Even today, the finest work is still done by hand. Can you imagine the effort that went into carving these 100 years ago? I knew there would be some kind of inscription, but I didn’t know they would be so gorgeous.”

In addition to uncovering some fine granitework, the location of the stones themselves — within a circle in what Mr Appell felt was one of the most coveted locations of the entire cemetery — tells a lot about the family buried below them.

“Look at the size of this plot,” he said, indicating with an outstretched arm the area of 17 stones, “especially at the front of this old cemetery. You have to have extensive wealth to be able to have a show of wealth like this after death.”

Mr Appell’s enthusiasm for and reverence of historic stonework is obvious.

“It takes an untold amount of toil and effort to create the monuments here,” he said while walking around the cemetery, pointing out stones that would go unnoticed by most visitors. “People have no idea. Think of the effort it took to get some of those large monuments up that hill, never mind into town,” he said, indicating a series of tall monuments at the top of the cemetery’s hill. Some of the monuments are made up of multiple pieces of granite or other types of stone, so they were created elsewhere and then assembled once the sections all arrived at the cemetery in an era long before heavy-duty trucks and motor-driven cranes.

“You can walk through an old cemetery and learn so much about an area’s history. You can tell carvers’ styles from the stones they worked on, and local construction techniques can be determined until about the mid-1900s. Once things became more mechanized, there was less variability.

“The oldest stones also tell you what was usually available nearby — they didn’t have the capability to move large slabs of stone too far, so they tended to work with what was in the area, whether slate or brownstone.”

Mr Appell’s work is far from complete in Newtown. Maureen Crick Owen said this week that he has already been hired to return next spring, and may even be asked to return for another project before the end of this year.

“What he did this year was only part one of a two-part phase,” said Maureen Crick Owen. “He did 36 stones this time, and the balance — another 24 — will be done next spring.”

There is no telling what Mr Appell will uncover during his next visit to Newtown.