Volunteers renovate cemetery through Adopt-a-plot program

CHERRYFIELD — The town’s oldest cemetery, which is located near Main Street, is being renovated through a program sponsored by the Cherryfield-Narraguagus Historical Society.

Project Adopt-a-plot, which was started one year ago by the historical society, has attracted 10 volunteer participants in the renovation project, according to William H. Conway, a member of the Adopt-a-plot Committee. Other committee members are Eleanorecq Mueller and Margery Brown, president of the historical society.

Under the adoption program, the committee members divided the cemetery into sections 30 feet square. Each volunteer or pair of volunteers was given guidelines for cleaning the headstones and restoring the burial plots. More volunteers are needed for Project Adopt-a-plot, according to the committee members.

All headstones in an area making up about one-third of the cemetery have been reset temporarily in preparation for cleaning the stones, according to Conway.

The committee has decided to recommend that the historical society provide for the purchase or donation of materials for the permanent resetting of the stones that are to be cleaned. The project will require bricks, crushed rock and some money, according to Conway.

The permanent resetting of the headstones will involve the excavation of the sites of the stones and the placement of foundations of bricks, rock and earth. The resetting of the stones will be based on recommendations found in a text titled “A Graveyard Preservation Primer.”

According to committee members, the so-called “Old Cemetery” was used until the time of the Civil War. After 1857, when the Pine Grove Cemetery was established on Campbell Hill, litle use was made of the Old Cemetery.

Many of the older headstones were fashioned of marble and slate. Among the earliest is that of Jeduthon Upton, whose stone bears the legend “Soldier of the Revolution … His works will follow him.” Upton died in 1815, at age 65.

Among the more than 200 burial plots in the cemetery are those of apparent ancestors of many present residents of the town, including Campbells, Ficketts, Harrimans, Leightons, Pattens and Tuckers.

Participants in the plot-adoption program are invited to help document the genealogy of the family names represented on the headstones and monuments.