Spring 2010
Vermont Observed
"The Earth Belongs to the Living"
By Castle Freeman Jr.
Illustrated by Jean Carlson Masseau
The oldest cemetery in the town of Newfane is located on Newfane Hill, not far from the spot where the town was first settled beginning around 1765. It sits right beside the road, a scant half-acre surrounded by stone walls and furnished with a lazy wooden gate that is permanently ajar.
The cemetery is the site of 165 burials — more or less. The exact number is uncertain, since not all the graves have markers today. Those that are marked have stones of three types. The oldest, dating from around 1800, are black slate, the later ones are marble, the newest, polished granite. A few of the stones are carved according to the conventional graveyard iconography of the 19th century (funeral urns, lambs, weeping willows). Many carry verses expressive of loss and mourning, the brevity of our earthly span, and a pious Christian assurance of virtuous life and heavenly reward. Eight stones are accompanied by low iron stands designed to hold small flags: the graves of soldiers, in this case, of the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
The most recent stone was placed in 1989, and it marks the end of the Newfane Hill cemetery as a going concern. If you seek a venue for your own eternal repose, you'll have to take your business to another shop. Newfane Hill is full up, like your favorite B & B on the peak weekend of foliage season.
The Newfane Hill cemetery is a quiet place, but it's by no means neglected. It's the setting regularly of contemplative retreat, amateur genealogy and even artwork, in the form of gravestone rubbing. The town's cemetery commissioners keep it mowed, keep it clear of branches fallen from the old sugar maples and ash trees that grow around it, keep the old soldiers' little flags renewed on Memorial Day. They do a good and conscientious job. But the upkeep they give the cemetery is just that — upkeep. It's not beautification. This graveyard is not a garden, it's not a park. There are no elaborate plantings, no impressive monuments. No frills.
The plainness of Newfane's old burying ground is of a piece with the older cemeteries in the more rural towns of Vermont as a whole. They don't have a lot of show. Around the middle of the 19th century, larger, richer communities began to go in for increasingly grand and complex burial structures, including sculptured stones and mausoleums, intended as memorials, not only to their occupants' piety but also to their worldly standing. In some of the cemeteries of Brattleboro and Bennington, good solid middle-class folk lie beneath tombs that would dignify the grave of a Roman generalissimo. It was a style that the Newfane Hill cemetery managed to resist. Here burials remained resolutely down-market.
The understated character of these Vermont cemeteries is more than a matter of their stonework. It comes as well from their location. We aren't talking about prime real estate here. On the contrary. In a village of the English countryside, or in an older settlement in coastal New England, the cemetery would commonly adjoin the church, but churchyard burials in the Vermont hills are not the rule. Why not?
Some historians suggest that our forebears felt churchyard burials smacked of the Old World and its popish past and repudiated them for that reason. Perhaps it's so. But I will venture a more prosaic explanation: gain. Remember, the church, or meetinghouse, stood in the village center. Were those early town fathers reluctant, by turning it into a boneyard, to put a perfectly good village lot to non-taxpaying, non-revenue-producing use? I suspect they were. And certainly the place they ended up selecting for the burying ground on Newfane Hill was never going to be the high-rent district. A quarter-mile down from the old settlement, the cemetery is laid out on a sidehill so steep one imagines the dear departed having to be roped in to their final resting places, like sleeping alpinists, lest they slide down the bank into the puckerbrush.
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"The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead," wrote Thomas Jefferson. He would have approved of Newfane Hill's memorial restraint. You can learn a lot about a time and place by seeing what contemporaries did with their forefathers' remains. The unadorned, utilitarian cemeteries of the Vermont hill country are evidence of a people likewise unadorned and utilitarian — a busy, practical, unsentimental people, materialists, who were determined to live in this world, not the world to come, and not the world of the past. They weren't much on monuments, they weren't pyramid builders, but in their unassuming way, they built quite well enough. After all, how many pyramids do you need?
