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One of our historic cemeteries is falling apart
By adamg on Thu, 01/13/2011 - 1:01pm
Melissa Manion cannot believe what she saw when she visited the Copp's Hill Burying Ground in the North End recently:
Copp's Hill is a mess. I cannot be blunter about that. One cannot even make out the words on the Shaw marker that our ancestors placed to honor this unique man. Gravestones are broken, their pieces are nowhere in sight. I can only hope that someone has them stored somewhere until they can be repaired and that they are not just gone for good. Stones are leaning into each other, many covered in lichen and with vines. There is no sense of honoring here, except for the Markers of the Mathers that some descendant likely conserved and this too troubles me. It would be unacceptable to me to watch the grounds around my loved ones rot away, imparting a feeling of some kind of cemetery ghetto.
Via The Two Palavers.
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Comments
granary burial grounds
didnt they catch someone dumping snow there a few years back?
To do...
There are numerous dynamics in play on this important topic. One might start at the Historic Burying Ground Initiative. It is woefully underfunded but has maintained some graves and sites.
For years, I went on the Tour des Graves sponsored by the city, largely because an employee loved cemeteries and bikes. We got to go from one public or private burying ground to another. Many are locked. The sites varied from year to year as well. We'd have iconographers and historians interpreting at the cemeteries. Our small (like $15 fees) went directly to the HBGI.
To the stones, not all is neglect. For economy, many older headstones in this town and region are sandstone. That is easier to work with and therefore much cheaper than slate or granite. They become unreadable through weathering and growths such as lichen. Those of the Grimke sisters and Rev. Weld in Mt. Hope are likewise illegible.
My understanding for the tours is that the woman moved on from Parks, insurance rates for the ride shot way up, and the city punked out on them. Reviving these or working with the initiative are long overdue.
Tour de Graves bike rides still happen every October
generally on a Saturday or Sunday closest to Halloween. The ride is no longer formally co-sponsored by Boston Parks & Recreation but still often visits Copps Hill and other Boston cemeteries.
(However, the 2010 ride instead went to graveyards in Cambridge, Belmont, Arlington, and Medford, just for the sake of variety.)
But HGBI?
...and of the aim of providing funds to restore and maintain the grounds, as was the case in the rides with hundreds of cyclists?
I don't know all of the history here
but I will pass this page on to Dick Bauer, who has led the bike ride for the past few years. (He's on the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission, which has had a special interest in restoring Somerville's Milk Row Cemetery on Somerville Avenue.)
10Q
I still have a bunch of short and long-sleeved tees, stretching back to early in Ray Flynn's mayorship. They have variations of the skeleton on a bone shaker bike. Sponsors donated the shirts and all the money went to cemetery upkeep. We got big crowds and had a jolly time.
I can't find your e-mail address
on UHub nor on any of your blogs. I finally tracked down a resume you posted online and sent you e-mail there. I hope you got it. (Why do you make it so hard for people to reach you?)
Sue Prize Sue Prize
I'm sorry you had trouble. I was about to add I was surprised, but then I looked at my UH account. I've been a member for five years and am pretty sure the default was for others to send a message without necessarily revealing the address (for spam prevention, I suppose). I hadn't looked in a long time and see that you need to tick a box to let that happen now. Ticked.
My BMG profile as well as my Blogger one has links to my personal site and/or emails. Most folk comment on Marry in Massachusetts, Harrumph! or Left Ahead! and don't care about the email.
Let's blame Adam and his constant toying with UH. Imagine, something not staying exactly the same for five years!
This is very simple -
This is very simple - long-dead don't vote. Even in Boston.
This city depends on tourism, and much of that comes from history. Yet no one in the city wants to spend a penny on history. "Green space" and new parks? Sure. Money to maintain old facilities - that actually mean something? Not so much.
This is not a new problem
To prove it, here's a picture from a book published in 1895:
http://books.google.com/books?id=u4j9SwFR8McC&pg=P...
Granted, the 1895 picture is intended to illustrate the old burying ground in Harvard Square, but the fact remains: That broken gravestone she saw may have been broken a century ago, with the pieces missing ever since. Books from the late 1800s have many comments about gravestone breakage and theft. John Hancock's original grave marker disappeared in the 1800s.
That being said, the situation isn't getting any better, and methinks it's gotten worse just in the last 30 years that I've been working with tourists in Boston's historic graveyards.
The HBGI (mentioned in earlier posts) is woefully underfunded. The comment about the long-dead not voting is spot on. For that matter, the tourists don't vote, at least not here, either. This explains why the state legislature didn't fund the public restroom on Hull Street (just down the street from Copp's Hill) last year. (It was a pet project of Sal DiMasi, now that he's gone, so is the funding). The only real money in tourism is in business travel and fancy conventions, which all goes to luxury hotels. Those people don't go to -- and don't care about -- the historic sites.
The last 3 decades have seen significant increases in visitation along the Freedom Trail, especially in guided walking tours through the graveyards. This has increased the wear and tear but there has been no increase in money to repair the damage. I understand that two tour operators (Freedom Trail Foundation and Old Town Trolley) have made some donations to HBGI, but the huge crowds tromping through those spaces are just tearing things up faster than they can be repaired.
I have photos I took of some important gravestones at the Granary in the early 1980s, and there's no trace of those stones today. (Benjamin Franklin's uncle and Samuel Adams' father-in-law.)
Copp's Hill, which is in a more isolated location, has had many vandalism incidents in recent years, including cutting down of recently-planted trees, and spray-painting of stones. Entire rows of stones have been painted gray, to cover up graffiti.
The Granary is also notorious for large amounts of trash and detritus that accumulate around some of the most visited graves, without ever being removed by the city.
About 10 years ago, vandals took a stone that had been stolen from another cemetery (God only knows where), and they deposited it in a prominent location at the Granary. (Madeline F. Conner, died Dec. 24, 1944.) It's still there, lying on the ground, all these years later! It's been there long enough that it's now starting to show up in guidebooks as the "most recent" burial in that graveyard. (Trust me, I KNOW that stone wasn't there in the 1980s!!) But the Parks Department has done absolutely nothing to reverse that obvious act of vandalism.
May Madeline Conner rest in peace, wherever she is.
that Madeline Conner (sp?) gravestone in the Granary
Your comment made me very curious, so I did a little Googling and ended up here:
BURIED IN HISTORIC PLOT; Madelyn Connor's Body Placed in 'The Granary' at Boston
It's a New York Times article preview -- actually, just a headline -- dated December 28, 1944. It is in the Books section, page 19, so I guess she was a writer. The spelling is different from what you gave, but the month and year match. One of us needs to go to the BPL microfilm room and find the full text of the article.
(I'd e-mail you, Charles, but I have no address for you.)
The joys of being a student -
The joys of being a student - one of the library's online databases is the historical NYT.
It's more a blurb than an article, and the text is as follows:
"Boston, Dec. 27 -- The body of Miss Madelyn F Connor, who died Sunday in Wellesley at the age of 90, was placed today in a grave in the historic old Granary Burying Ground beside the Park Street Church in downtown Boston where rest many heroes of the American Revolution.
The burial was the first since 1931 in the Granary, which was established in 1660."
Do you have access to historical Boston Globe too?
And if so, can you look up this name in the Globe for December 1944? That year is not yet available in the for-pay database that the Globe makes available to the public.
1944 has not been digitized.
1944 has not been digitized. They are supposedly doing one year at a time now, and I think they're up to 1928.
You can access historical
You can access historical Boston Globe via microfilm at the Copley Boston Public Library.
The Boston Globe wasn't a major paper then
In 1944 the Globe was still a relatively minor paper in Boston. The Herald was the paper that most "proper Bostonians" would have read, that is to say, the only "serious" paper in town. The Globe didn't gain its prominence until the 1960s. The pre-1970 Herald had little resemblance to the present newspaper of the same name. It was the Hearst chain (the Record-American) which acquired the Herald, and its name, then merged it into the Record-American, and remade it in the Hearst image.
Ms. Connor (Conner) being from Wellesley, one can assume that she was a Proper Bostonian.
I looked up the name (both
I looked up the name (both Madelyn and Madeline) in a few different places (including what I have of the Globe) and found nothing further, sadly. Anon below is correct - the historical Globe database only goes up to 1928, and their regular database only goes back to around, I think, 1970something.
I stand by my comment...
that vandals placed Madeline Conner's stone in its present location ON (not in) the ground. Based on what Ron has found, there's a chance that she was buried elsewhere in the Granary. (Although I had read elsewhere, prior to 1990, that the "most recent" burial was considerably earlier than 1944.)
Nevertheless, the stone was NOT in its current location prior to around 2000. It's right next to the Samuel Adams monument and I've been going there regularly since the early 1980s. Perhaps it was elsewhere in the Granary; the vandals could have removed it from wherever it was, and then just plopped it on top of the ground near Samuel. But its current location is definitely an act of vandalism.
Far from the Only One
On those Tour de Grave spins, we learned from the lecturers provided that there is little geographic correlation between corpse and stone. Granary received several makeovers as well as expansion.
The original plots were per family. The owners did not plan for the convenience of future tour bus riders and picture takers. Graves and stones were decidedly not in the rows facing the same way they are now.
The remains may or may not be close to a given stone.