Peter Pond newsletter :: December 2006 :: #26

Hartford Courant - Hartford, Conn.
Author: LYNN DOAN, Courant Staff Writer
Date: Oct 23, 2006
Start Page: A.1
Section: MAIN (A)
Text Word Count: 839

(Copyright The Hartford Courant 2006)
People claim to live with skeletons in their closets, but tombstones in their basements?
Some Suffield residents don't need Halloween to deck their lawns with graveyard scenes. Old headstones are gathering dust in the basements and backyards of a number of the town's older homes.

In Carol and Thomas Kaput's 18th century home, two tombstones -- one etched with "In Memory of Isaac Griffin" -- lie side-by-side on the basement floor. A small stone that appears to have been carved for an infant rests nearby against the water heater.

"They're all over the place," Carol Kaput said of the tombstones in her house. "We're just waiting for the next one to pop up somewhere.

"At least a half-dozen Suffield families have discovered these seemingly abandoned tombstones, many made of expensive marble, in and around their homes. More have been spotted in deeply wooded areas, on hills and just off public sidewalks in town.

Nick Bellantoni, the state archaeologist, said the small clusters of stones are not uncommon in rural, farming towns across Connecticut, specifically in the eastern and central parts of the state. Many 18th century farmers reserved land for burials, he said.

"Back then, rather than trying to get the body to the town cemetery, it was just easier to bury in the backyard," Bellantoni said.

In North Stonington, a town of 5,000 in northeast Connecticut, locals have counted about 120 "private cemeteries" in backyards and far-off wooded areas, he said. Stones also have been spotted in East Windsor and East Granby homes.

Back in Suffield, Carol Kaput found another headstone shoved into the home's wood-burning stove, apparently to absorb some of the heat. Kaput, a schoolteacher, found the location sacrilegious and dragged the stone, engraved with "Larmon Holcomb/Farewell my friends and children/Keep me in your memory," to her herb garden in the back of the house.

Just behind the front door of another old house in northern Suffield, there's a weathered tombstone in the entryway to Anita Wardell's living room. Time has worn off all engravings.

A second one served as the lid to a water drainage system in the back of the house. When the system was filled with concrete, the Wardells moved the tombstone to the entrance of their patio, where it serves as a stepping stone.

It is etched with the name of Henry Easton, who apparently died in Aug. 1876 at age 59.

"People will walk into the patio and step onto the tombstone and do kind of a double take," said Wardell, whose house dates to the 1730s. "He's become the topic of conversation at quite a few dinner parties."

These conversations have fueled a couple of theories on how the headstones ended up anywhere but in a cemetery.

Kaput has heard from neighbors that a road was once paved through Copper Hill Cemetery, about a mile from her home. To make way for the road, neighbors say, cemetery officials plucked tombstones from the ground and returned them to the families of the departed.

But Kenneth Seymour, who has been a sexton for the cemetery for nearly 15 years, said he couldn't recall such a project.

Janet Banks, a Suffield real estate agent and member of the town's heritage committee, offered a much simpler scenario.

"Families often replaced headstones with fancier ones," said Banks, who recently sold a house with two marble headstones included. "Being Yankees who just couldn't throw away a good piece of marble, they'd bring it back to the farm and put it to good use."

The Yankee theory explains why the two headstones on the property Banks just sold now serve as stepping stones into an old barn.

Both scenarios are possible, Bellantoni said, but chances are that "where there's a tombstone, there's a body."

"Many of the town cemeteries only represent 30 to 40 percent of the town's population at the time," he said. "We don't know where the rest were buried.

"The spooky part: a cluster of five tombstones in a field or open space, Bellantoni said, usually means about 10 bodies are actually beneath the soil.

"African slaves weren't going to get markers," he said.

Particularly in Suffield, town historian Lester Smith said, residents had a reason to bury their dead in "lonesome, distant locations." When a smallpox epidemic struck the town in the 1700s, families decided to bury their infected dead far enough away to prevent the spread of the disease, he said.

One such burial apparently took place on River Boulevard. Both a headstone and footstone belonging to a "Richard Austin" still stand between the road and the riverbank.

Carol Kaput said she believes that her resident tombstones were simply phased out by fancier ones or dug up to make way for a road.

Contact Lynn Doan at ldoan@courant.com.

AMHERST, Mass. - For Emily Dickinson, death was never too far from the imagination. The topic fueled her writing, making for some of the most memorable lyrics in American poetry.

Now, death is posing a bit of a puzzle for the caretakers of her homestead.

While making improvements to the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum on Halloween, workers unearthed the gravestone of one of the poet's relatives.

But exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert's headstone was doing under 18 inches of dirt in Dickinson's front yard has some experts stumped - especially knowing that his remains are buried in a nearby cemetery with a more ornate grave marker.

"What do you do with a used gravestone?" asked Jane Wald, the museum's executive director. "It might have been used as a step or used to cover a hole in the ground. We don't know exactly why it was placed there."

To be sure, more is known about Gilbert than the simple marble slab that bears his name and date of death. An innkeeper, merchant, lawmaker and member of the Massachusetts militia who lived in Greenfield, Gilbert had seven children and outlived his wife. But when he died a pauper in 1841, his youngest daughter, Susan, moved to Amherst to live with an older sister.

That's where she met Dickinson, when both girls were 14. Their lifelong friendship deepened in 1856, when Emily's brother, Austin, married Susan. To entice the newlyweds into staying in Amherst, Austin and Emily's father built them a house next to the Dickinson homestead.

Susan, who long endured taunts and barbs from Amherst residents who considered her father to be a drunk because he owned a tavern, may have wanted to put her detractors in place by moving her father's grave from Greenfield to Amherst.

When Gilbert and his wife were reburied close to the Dickinson homestead in West Cemetery, their plot was adorned with a new marker. The gravestone dug up earlier this week was likely the original stone from Gilbert's Greenfield grave, Wald suspects.

"In that regard, it makes sense for this grave marker to be found around here," she said.

The marker was found by workers digging a trench to improve water drainage. When their excavation equipment hit slabs of stone, they started digging by hand.

Chunks of marble - some with letters or numbers carved in them - started surfacing. By the time they were done, 15 pieces were unearthed and arranged like an oversized jigsaw puzzle. A few gaps in the slab remain, but the marker clearly reads "Gen. Tho. Gilbert. Died Dec. 23, 1841." The number 48, his age when he died, rests at the bottom.

Wald guesses the gravestone went underground as one piece, but shattered under pressure of time and landscaping equipment that's been rolling over the homestead grounds during the past few years.

Emily Dickinson, who wrote most of her hundreds of poems about nature, love, life and death in her second-floor bedroom, died in 1886. The last surviving member of the Dickinson family was Austin and Susan's daughter, Martha, who sold the homestead in 1916.

It was purchased in 1965 by Amherst College and opened by the school as a museum in 2003.

Other maintenance and repair work has unearthed pieces of ceramics, a mouth harp, coins and a brick gutter.

"There's always a great deal of potential for archaeological finds at a site like this," Wald said.