Retirees plot lost gravesites
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
WATERBORO — Deep in the woods off Bradeen Road, Edieanne Hutchinson leaned down to brush off an icy gravestone.
Hutchinson was leading visitors on a cross-country ski tour of the Israel Chadbourne cemetery, which holds the remains of one of the town's first families.
"This is Humphrey Chadbourne," she said, reading the inscription on the headstone. "He died on May 11, 1798 at age 82."
The Chadbourne plot is just one of 124 different cemeteries that Hutchinson, a 75-year-old retired science teacher, and her husband, Alfred, have located and restored during the past 14 years. They have photographed each gravestone and plotted the location of every cemetery with a global positioning device. Her work has drawn queries from people all over the country looking for lost ancestors, and has prevented the abandoned family plots in Waterboro from disappearing forever. It also drew the town together in the search for lost gravesites.
The Hutchinsons' efforts come at a time when interest in old cemeteries is growing as communities try to comply with state laws requiring graves of all war veterans to be maintained by local governments. The graves must be fenced off and decorated with a flag, or the town can be fined $100. New developments have encroached on some abandoned plots, touching off concerns that family cemeteries will be destroyed to make way for malls and residential subdivisions.
Like many towns in southern Maine, Waterboro has a large inventory of family plots created when the region was first settled in the late 1700s. Most of them continued to be used into the mid-1800s. But when people left the farms for mill work, they were abandoned and lost.
Family plots proliferated in many early Maine communities, says Roland G. Jordan of the Maine Old Cemetery Association. Towns were often settled long before there were churches or local governments to establish community graveyards.
"You were on your own out in the puckerbrush," he said.
Although Waterboro's 124-plus plots seem numerous, other towns have even more. For example, North Berwick has 175 cemeteries which the town recently catalogued on its online database.
Hutchinson's interest in history attracted her to her project in 1988, a few years after she and her husband retired from Danvers, Mass., to a new home on Strout Lane, after spending many summers at a family cabin on Little Ossipee Lake.
The Waterborough Historical Society had called for residents to adopt one of the abandoned family cemeteries in town. "We said ¥yes.' We were the only ones," she said.
The Hutchinsons adopted their first cemetery, the Chadbourne-Hooper plot on Deering Ridge Road. It was a tree-choked burial ground filled with brush and toppled gravestones.
The Hutchinsons spent days clearing out the trees with a chain saw and removing the brush. They hunted down gravestones, and scrubbed off layers of lichen and moss growth with water and a stiff plastic brush.
They became practitioners in the art of gravestone restoration. Hutchinson contacted a granite company in Barre, Vt., to find out how to repair stones and discovered a special epoxy that did the trick. The couple glued the broken ones back together and repositioned them in the rocky soil.
Two years later they completed the Chadbourne-Hooper plot. But Hutchinson found herself hooked.
"When you see something all in disarray and then you put it right and see how nice it looks, you want to do it again," she said.
So she set off on a research project to locate and restore every cemetery in town, except for the four large community cemeteries and several others maintained by private groups. She dipped into old town archives and worked from a 1968 census of cemeteries put together by a Berwick resident.
As word of her work spread around town, hunters called with descriptions of cemeteries they had stumbled across in the woods. Finding the lost cemeteries often turned into a treasure hunt. Working with rough descriptions, the Hutchinsons would hike miles into dense woods searching for old cellar holes and other signs of habitation.
Hutchinson learned to look for the nearest rise or high ground, where families often positioned their burial plots. They spent hours poking the ground with a probe for buried stones.
"The graves either faced east or west. If they face east they were there to welcome the Lord when he came back and if they faced west they were heading home to the Lord," she said.
In the course of her project, Hutchinson uncovered and restored plots with family names such as Caleb Carpenter, Israel Coffin, Abigail Jones and Noah Ricker. She discovered one cemetery with graves for five little girls from the same family, none of whom made it past age 2.
They found, fenced in and decorated the gravesites of 14 war veterans, including a veteran of the Aroostook War, an 1839 border skirmish between English Canadians and Maine residents.
Over the years others have joined in the quest, including Charles and Ruth Kearn of Waterboro, and student volunteers from the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at Massabesic High School. Hutchinson and her husband financed the entire operation by themselves until three years ago, when the town appropriated $5,000 a year to keep the project going.
Hutchinson has plotted all of the family cemeteries on a GPS receiver — except those adjacent to roads that are easy to find.
Hutchinson has listed the coordinates for Waterboro cemeteries on the town library's Web site at www.waterboro.lib.me.us.
The town has rallied around the project. They say the Hutchinsons' work ensures that Waterboro's cemeteries will never again be forgotten.
"The Hutchinsons have done a wonderful job and they have worked yard," Selectman Willis Lord said.
Imrgard Linscott, a member of the town's planning advisory group, says Hutchinson's project has involved even the oldest residents who helped locate some of the forgotten plots.
"She deserves all the kudos she can get, " Linscott said.
Recently Hutchinson tried to retire from her project and hand it off to new volunteers. The Waterboro Cemetery Committee would hear nothing of it. Instead, they made her their chairman and pledged to take over the maintenance of the town's family cemeteries.
The committee now hopes to refurbish each cemetery in Waterboro at least every two or three years. That works out to 40 cemeteries a year.
Hutchinson says she welcomes the help. "History is in a cemetery," she said.