Resting place of early Catholics to be marked

BANGOR – The original resting place of many of Bangor’s first Irish settlers will be dedicated in a brief ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 16.

A monument marking the first Roman Catholic cemetery in the city is now part of Old Cemetery Park at the corner of Buck Street and West Broadway.

The marker and the dedication are projects of the Cemetery Angels, a volunteer group organized in 1997 by Louise Towle and Sylvia Smith to assist Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Ohio Street.

As for Old Cemetery Park, “it’s a forgotten piece of history,” according to John Frawley, member of the Cemetery Angels and retired city engineer.

Frawley said before the monument project was started last year that the first Roman Catholic cemetery on Buck Street served as a burial ground from 1836 through 1885.

The headstones, and possibly the remains, were moved to Mount Pleasant, because headstones there date back to the 1840s. The cemetery itself opened in 1854.

In the mid-1940s, the first cemetery site on Buck Street was conveyed to the city and became part of the West Broadway extension project.

“I actually sort of discovered this as a kid,” Frawley said last fall. “I grew up on Silver Road and remember that there used to be just a field there with a park down through the middle of it.” He was among the youngsters who used to hang around the construction project, watching the heavy machinery.

“We actually saw little bits and pieces of wood and bone there,” he said.

Saturday’s ceremony will honor those first Roman Catholics in the city, many of whom were involved in building St. John’s Catholic Church in the 1850s.

Participants in the dedication will include the Rev. Richard McLaughlin, pastor of St. John’s; Frawley, cemetery historian; Teresa Tracy, president of the Cemetery Angels; and the Knights of Columbus.

The Cemetery Angels have been very busy since the organization began nine years ago.

“The biggest thing has been the monument cleaning, and getting stones righted and repaired in Mount Pleasant,” Towle explained.

Several of the members have been involved in cleaning the stones, but fixing and righting them has mainly been the project of three of the “angels,” John Frawley, Carl Loper and Gene Curless Jr.

Other projects of the Cemetery Angels at Mount Pleasant have been new waterlines, improved roads, a new flagpole, fence repairs, planting flowers and helping with the records.

All are welcome to attend Saturday’s dedication.

The plaque reads:

OLD CEMETERY PARK

In April of 1836, Benedict J. Fenwick, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Boston, purchased this parcel of land, whereon he established the first Catholic cemetery in Bangor. It served the needs of the growing Roman Catholic community, mostly Irish immigrants, until Mount Pleasant Cemetery was developed in 1855, after which it was abandoned. In 1944 the land was conveyed to the City of Bangor to permit the completion of West Broadway.

This park is dedicated to the memory of those early settlers who were buried here, and to all who helped to shape the heart and soul of early Bangor.

Lest they be forgotten.