Community Corner

Cemetery that Dates to Revolutionary War to be Restored in Fall

Damage to Headstones Blamed on Trees that Fell in March Nor'easter and May 8 Storm

A cemetery on Bronson Road in Fairfield that includes the graves of people who fought in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812 and Civil War is due to be restored this fall, after headstones toppled and broke in two storms this spring, Greenfield Hill residents said today.

The Greenfield Hill Cemetery, which is near the top of Bronson Road, next to Fairfield Country Day School, includes about 600 graves and is one of three cemeteries in Fairfield overseen by the town's Parks and Recreation Commission. The other two are the Old Burying Ground on Beach Road and Fairfield West Cemetery at 2011 Post Road, next to the building that housed Devore's Bakery.

More than a dozen headstones in Greenfield Hill Cemetery were toppled over, broken or perched at an angle this afternoon, and the trunk of a tree toward the back of the cemetery was uprooted.

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John Jones, president of the Greenfield Hill Village Improvement Association, a neighborhood group,  said the damage wasn't due to vandalism, but to the March 13 Nor'easter and another storm May 8.

Jones said five trees in or by the cemetery came down in the Nor'easter and another two came down in the storm that followed.

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Greenfield Hill residents, led by Melanie Marks of Bronson Road and under the supervision of Ruth Shapleigh-Brown, executive director of the Connecticut Gravestone Network in Manchester, have held annual cleanups in the cemetery since 2008, and the next cleanup, to repair damage visible today, should be in late September or early October, Marks and Jones said.

"It's the respectable thing to do," Shapleigh-Brown said in a phone interview this afternoon. "It is our history, and presently I'm working with a lot of groups because the theme is our municipalities do not have funds to keep the properties up. We've got money problems everywhere, and trying to have enough help...It's easy for people to complain, but it's not easy to do the maintenance."

Shapleigh-Brown said the Greenfield Hill Cemetery was significant based on people who are buried there. "I think that the notoriety there is, they have more Revolutionary War soldiers there than any other cemetery in the state," she said.

Marks, who's chairman of the GHVIS' Cemetery Committee, said today that she's going to arrange a date for Shapleigh-Brown to come down to the Greenfield Hill Cemetery and teach volunteers how to reset stones, clean stones and fix broken stones. She said Shapleigh-Brown came to the 2008 and 2009 cleanups and that she hopes to enlist the help of Fairfield High School students and Boy Scouts in the upcoming cleanup effort.

"If they're simple breaks, the kind of epoxy we use can set in the morning, put clamps on and take out in the afternoon," Shapleigh-Brown said, adding that she doesn't have the expertise to fix more complicated breaks. Cleaning headstones is done with water, and resetting them in the ground is done "the old fashioned way," which does not include cement, she said.

Marks also said the damage in Greenfield Hill Cemetery was due to the two storms this spring, though she said some headstones may have toppled over or fallen at an angle last winter due to frost heave. She added that old headstones are brittle and snap off if they lean at an angle for too long.

Marks said the town cleaned out a lot of the trees from the cemetery after the storms and that a neighbor paid to have the cemetery's front stone wall repaired after a tree on his property fell and broke a section of it.

Marks said she had to contact state Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni this spring because one of the trees that fell in the cemetery uprooted headstones and she wanted to make sure people's remains hadn't been disturbed (they hadn't.) The trunk of that tree is still uprooted in the cemetery and probably will be removed in the summer when Town Tree Warden Ken Placko has seasonal help, Marks said.

Marks said she has a passion for restoring cemeteries and has worked on ones outside of Fairfield as well. "They're mini museums in the middle of fields and woods. There's a lot to be learned from [them]," she said.

But restoring cemeteries to ensure they're in good condition is work that will never be done because nature, time and occasional vandals take their toll on the dearly departed. "It's an ongoing thing, you're never going to be finished...There's always something - a headstone that's down, a headstone that's broken," she said.


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