Origins

The history of the cemetery begins in 1762, a year after the settlers' arrival. The first year they were reoccupied with clearing fields and building cabins, too busy to decide where their burying-ground would eventually be located.

In February of 1762, a decision was made to locate the proposed church (and meeting house) and the cemetery on land just west of the Gypsy Lane near Walloomsac Road. Had this plan been carried out, our cemetery would have been located nearly a mile to the west of its actual location. For now unknown reasons, a change in plans in the late summer resulted in the present location. The new site was at the main road junction in the center of the new township.

That fall, before any construction work of the meeting house had begun, the first burial in what was expected to become the cemetery took place, when the widow Bridget Harwood died while working in the fields at age 49. Her gravestone is not too far from the northwest corner of the adjacent church. The grave is marked by an old stone, but as there were no gravestone carvers in the community at the time, it is thought that her grave was originally marked with a wooden marker, as was custom at the time.

1766

3 acre for cemetery(more)

1777 & Battle of Bennington

It is not until 1777 that the earliest direct reference to the cemetery is found in the records of Bennington. At that time, the Proprietors appointed a committee "to regulate the burial ground by drawing lines in a proper range so that the ground may prudently be used & to let out the burying yard on conditions such as fencing & …" [the passage stops abruptly, as if the clerk ran out of ink or was called away]. If the commmittee made a map, its existence has never been known.

The Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777, produced a mass grave in our cemetery, marked by a stone in 1896, under which lie an estimated fifty soldiers of both sides who died of their wounds enroute to town from the battlefield or in the field hospital located north of the present cemetery. Those who succumbed were buried over a period of days and weeks after the battle. An oral tradition of descendants of German mercenaries who settled in the Mohawk Valley placed the number of German wounded who later died here at thirty-three. Best estimates are that revolutionary forces suffered about ten deaths from wounds from the battle. The American dead should be mostly men of New Hampshire and some from Massachusetts and Vermont. The enemy dead should be mostly Germans from Brunswick, some American Loyalists, and a few English soldiers and Canadian militiamen.

The only soldiers killed as the battlefield whose bodies were carried back to town were to local men, John Fay and Henry Walbridge. A third man, Nathan Clark, Jr., was brought back wounded and died months later. These three are all buried here in marked graves. A fourth local man, Daniel Warner, is believed to be buried at the battlefield.

Late 18th Century

Allowing cattle to graze in the cemetery was the early method of mowing, as shown be a resolution in 1782 to accept the offer of Timothy Follett to fence in the burying yard "with a good decent board fence and make a good gate for entrance into the same, for the benefit of pasturing the same with such creatures as shall not damage the graves, the creatures permitted are horses, sheep, cattle, for the term of ten years provided he keeps sd. fence in good repair"

more to come …

The original land set aside for the cemetery was less than on acre. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were many parcel additions resulting in over five acres now.