Portfolio at NYU

Posted 07.13.04
Interest revived in long derelict cemetery
The Boston Globe, January 12, 2004

By Gretchen Weber

Julie Thompson remembers riding dirt bikes with her cousins in the sand pits surrounding Bellingham's Oak Hill Cemetery. Even then, she said, the graveyard was a mess.

"I always remember complaining when I was a little girl about how bad it was here," said Thompson, new president of the private cemetery and leader of an effort to turn the place around. "It was so unkempt it was scary."

That was almost 30 years ago. Since then, Wal-Mart and Home Depot have taken over the sand pits. The horse farm that used to extend behind the cemetery is long gone. When traffic backs up at the light by the shopping plaza on Hartford Avenue, long lines of cars stretch across the front of the small hill, the burial place for Bellingham residents from as far back as the Revolution.

And despite all the neighborhood changes, the cemetery has remained neglected.

"It's kind of rough up there," said caretaker Ernie Stockton, who earns $1,200 a year to dig graves, plow the road in winter, and mow the property four times during the summer. "There's a lot of work that could be done, but getting in there with equipment and men - that costs money."

The cemetery, also known as North Bellingham Cemetery, was officially established in 1849, although the town, incorporated in 1719, had already been burying people just next to the site for almost a hundred years. The graveyard now has two parts. The oldest section is town-owned, and a "newer" section - most graves are from 1800 and later - is the privately held graveyard, owned commonly by all who have ever purchased graves on the property.

The graveyard is a catalog of generations of Bellingham families, but some names are barely legible on the faded and broken slate stones. Daniel Penniman, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, died in 1776. His widow, aged 27, died the same year. Both are buried here. Some stones are worn smooth, their surfaces covered with lichen, the names lost forever.

Oak Hill remains a functioning, if struggling, cemetery. One person was buried here in 2003, Stockton said, and grave plots are still for sale. Aside from the overgrown brush and broken headstones, the cemetery's age is its weakness. Despite new aspirations to fix it up, there is no money for rehabilitation.

"A lot of these were all perpetual care graves that sold for $1 or $2 way back in the 1800s," said Thompson, 35, whose grandparents and infant daughter are buried there. "That money is long gone. Ninety percent of the people buried here passed a very long time ago, and their families are no longer here."

The cemetery is trapped in a vicious cycle: With so few burials, there is almost no money coming in for upkeep. And with such minimal upkeep, families have little incentive to purchase plots there.

And according to Thompson, the neglect of the cemetery runs deeper than just the crumbling stones and overgrown landscape.

Documents indicate that more than 300 people were buried in the cemetery from 1849 to 1997, but when Thompson took over as president last summer, she was shocked to discover that she can find no burial records for the cemetery after 1960.

"We have no record of who's been buried here for the past 40 years," she said. "I cried when I couldn't find my daughter's or my grandmother's names. I was devastated. There's no record of them except for their names on the stone."

Kelly Stockton, the caretaker's wife, said that four years ago she created a computerized map of the cemetery using information from "a little faded and cracking cardboard handwritten thing in pencil from the 1930s," which she found among some records. She added more recent burials from what records she could find and from her own personal knowledge.

Cemetery trustee Melanie Berchtold said that if official burial records for the last few decades do exist, no one knows where they are. Many recent trustees and the former caretaker have died, she said.

"There were so many trustees involved over the years. People kept things in their homes, and now there is no one to tell us where things are," she said.

Florence McCracken, 79, a current trustee, was president of the cemetery for eight years during the 1980s and served as vice president more recently. She said that during her tenure she kept track of who bought new graves, but she doesn't remember keeping track of burials.

McCracken said she became involved with the cemetery because she discovered that the caretaker at the time had tried to sell some of the lots her family already owned. She wanted to straighten out what she felt was mismanagement.

"I bit off a little more than I could chew," McCracken said. "I'm very glad now to hand things over to Julie."

Thompson said she didn't plan to take over, but she didn't hesitate when McCracken and other elderly trustees handed her the reins.

Last May, she and her family spent a day cleaning the area around the graves of her grandparents and infant daughter, who died of sudden infant death syndrome. Instead of feeling better about the appearance of the graves, she said, she felt worse because the surrounding cemetery was in such poor shape. So she tracked down the cemetery committee and voiced her concerns. They immediately appointed her president.

Within months, Thompson placed notices in local papers asking anyone with relatives buried in the cemetery to contact her so she can begin cataloging the last 43 years. She has since received calls from as far away as Alabama.

This month, she plans to start soliciting donations in funds or materials from local businesses to help with the cleanup. She also plans to remove many of the young trees growing within the cemetery to make room for more plots, so that she can sell more graves to raise money for maintenance.

There are 25 gravesites for sale at Oak Hill, and Thompson hopes that once work is underway there will be as many as 100.

Berchtold said that she hopes eventually to get the cemetery on the National Register of Historic Places so it is eligible for funding. The process is complex, however, and she said the first task is to fully catalog who is buried there.

Julie Thompson asks that anyone with information about people buried at Oak Hill Cemetery call her at 508-478-0390.