Cemetery receives loving care Amity Grange members scour old headstones

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AMITY – Armed with scrub brushes, bottles of bleach, bags of concrete and tubes of epoxy, members of Cary-Amity Grange 384 set about the task of refurbishing one of three town cemeteries in Amity.

With its broken and overgrown headstones, many of them blackened by lichens, the Grangers decided that the cemetery across U.S. Route 1 from the Amity Baptist Church would be the target for their first community service project. They went to work on it last week.

“The cemetery, together with the Baptist church, are two of the first things seen when people come into town,” said Debbie Cone, one of the Grange volunteers.

In addition to the church, the town’s former one-room schoolhouse is just up the road and the Grange Hall is just to the south.

“We’re trying to show the connection between the school, the Grange and the church,” she said. “That was the whole network in this town.”

Gary Salpietro, another volunteer, added: “Cemeteries are the history of a town. If you let this go, you can never get it back.”

Besides history, the condition of the cemetery also tells passers-by something about the town today, said George Moorehouse, a past master and current steward for the Grange. A run-down cemetery, he said, implies that townspeople don’t care.

The cemetery project came about as a result of efforts within the Grange to save itself from dying, according to Moorehouse.

Although 15 people from Cary Plantation and Amity are listed as members, Moorehouse said it has been often difficult to meet the minimum requirement of seven members in order to hold a meeting.

Not long ago, the national Grange lifted restrictions on nonmembers viewing the secret rituals of the organization. With that, members of the Cary-Amity Grange began inviting people to potluck suppers to learn more about the organization, which, in its heyday, served as the political power arm for the nation’s farmers.

“We’re in hopes we’re not beating on a dead horse,” said Moorehouse, taking a break from repairing a headstone that dated to the late 1800s. “I don’t think we are.”

He said six people joined the Grange last month, and he hopes community service projects like the one at the cemetery will entice more people to get involved.

Cone is one of them.

Looking at the headstones of Edmund and Barbara Cone, the second settlers in Amity and her daughter’s great-great-grandparents, she said the two broken stones close to Route 1 were cleaned and repaired just before Memorial Day. At that time, she said, she learned that three other stones nearby were those of relatives as well, so those also were cleaned up.

“What started with two turned into five,” she said, looking on the restored white markers. “A little epoxy, a little bleach, and look how nice you can make them look.”

Being involved in restoration work isn’t new for Cone, or most of the other volunteers either, who also have been actively working to restore the Reed School and have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Any lost cause and they sucker me in,” said Cone with a laugh.

Based on the success of the work on the Cone headstones in May, Grange volunteers approached the town’s Board of Selectmen with a request for funds to fix other stones. The town officials gave the group $100 to buy supplies.

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” said Cone, as she looked across the cemetery at other markers.

She pointed out one headstone toward the back of the cemetery that marked the grave of a 2-year-old boy who died in 1942. His family had moved away long ago and the stone had fallen over.

“There was nobody to take care of it,” said Cone, adding that the volunteers set it back on its base and secured it.

Numerous other headstones have broken with age, have tipped over as they settled into the soft earth, or have become overgrown with moss and lichens, making them difficult to read. Some stones are missing.

During one of last week’s cleanup sessions, the volunteers were ecstatic to find some of those missing stones as they cut back overgrown flowers and bushes from another site.

The stones had marked the graves of the children of Columbus and Rebecca Dunn, who died in the late 1800s. When the stones tipped over or were broken, they were placed behind another headstone of an unrelated person for safekeeping and became overgrown.

“Who knows what we’ll find when we start cutting back on some of these other things?” said volunteer Larry Hamilton excitedly after looking at the discovery.

One special part of the cemetery project will involve marking the graves of former Amity schoolteachers with small flags, similar to the way veterans’ graves are marked.

Cone said the flags will be white and will bear a picture of the Reed School and the word “teacher.”

There are three town cemeteries in Amity. In addition to the one on Route 1, there is one in south Amity and a third on Estabrook Road. A fourth cemetery is private, but Grange members hope that eventually they will be allowed to restore it as well.

The Cary-Amity Grange was founded in 1902; so next year will be its centennial anniversary.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we won a community service award [from the national Grange] for this on our anniversary?” said Cone of the cemetery project.