The Old Town Hall Cemetery
On a beautiful late September morning in 2021, a small group of Washington residents arrived at the Old Town Hall Cemetery ready to work. The project? Restoring the historic tombstones under the auspice of Washington’s Historical Commission. Some were broken, most were leaning and covered with mold and fungus. There were two goals that day. One was to right some markers that were leaning the most, and the second was to clean stones. I brought D2, the recommended cleaning solution, and scrub brushes. Others people brought shovels. Linda Levernoch brought muffins, so we were well prepared for the day. Over the next weeks, we gained momentum on the project so that heading into winter, some of the stones most at risk for breaking were straight and safe, and many stones were clean and readable.
The Old Town Hall Cemetery is a spot in Washington that holds a lot of our town’s history. The folks buried there lived their lives on the very place we’re living our lives. They worked, raised their families, interfaced with their neighbors, volunteered for the town, and were as engaged in life as we are now. It’s a hobby of mine to study our town’s history, but most of the people buried in the cemetery are unknown to me. I think about them a lot when I’m working on restoring their gravestones. Each person there has a story. They were remembered by those who loved them, and then a generation or two later, most were forgotten.
In the east corner of the cemetery, there are several fragments of stones. It’s impossible to see how they all fit together. None of the pieces had a name on it, but one fragment reads “We miss thee at home”. A family missed someone at home. We don’t know who they were, but certainly we can imagine how they felt.
In 2022, it was our goal to get someone here who could mend some of the stones that were broken using a budget that had, over years, accumulated some funds just for this kind of project. I found the perfect person– Rich Atwood, owner of A&A Memorials. So in the spring, the growing group of us continued meeting at the cemetery to prepare stones for mending. Rich’s circumstances changed, and he was unable to work on our stones, but he kindly took the time to teach me. So in the fall, our team got together to mend and reinstall stones.
If all of this stone moving sounds easy, it’s not. Some are small and manageable, but others are very heavy. John McElwain and I experimented with setting up scaffolding over a large stone and hoisting it up to maneuver it into position. This was also not easy, especially because the burial ground is on a hill. We settled on the difficult but simpler method of digging, shimmying, and setting in place. It takes at least 2 people for the big stones, and we’re grateful that Scott Hayward brings his “persuader”, an impressive heavy metal bar that helps us move rocks out of our way and nudge markers into place.
We have a map of grave locations that was created in the 1970s. It’s not completely accurate though; there are graves in the cemetery that are not on that map, and when they created the map 50 years ago, there were stones that could not be read. They remain nameless still. One day I noticed a rock near 2 disintegrating unreadable gravestones. It looked like a rock, anyway, but I decided to see if it might be a gravestone fragment. It was. The front was face forward in the ground, and nearby, I found the bottom piece buried next to the nearby gravestones. This is the gravestone of Elizabeth Chapel, daughter of Patience and Joseph Chapel. She died in 1784 when she was one year old. Her marker is standing and clean now.
The stones are like a jumping off point of the telling of Washington’s history and the story of our country, so it seems befitting to write about the first two people buried in this graveyard; Doctor Joseph Chaplin and Robert McKnight. They both died in 1776.
At the time they died, Washington’s church, which was almost certainly on the spot where the Old Town Hall now sits, had been built just 2 years before. Washington was called Hartwood at that time. It was only 13 years before this that the first people settled in Hartwood, and they were still busy clearing land, building homes, creating roads, and establishing the town. The population was around 750 (as compared to our current population of under 500).
The 13 colonies had formed a new Continental Congress, and began asserting independence from England. George Washington was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army just a year before, and Hartwood men had been gathering nearby (at the corner of Washington Mountain Road and West Branch Road) to train for battle. Hartwood was well represented in the fight for independence, sending minutemen to battles in Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. The predominant sentiment of the town must have been favorable for autonomy from England since just one year later, the town was officially incorporated and named after General George Washington. The same month Chaplin died, Thomas Jefferson presented the Declaration of Independence to Congress.
These stormy events must have fallen into the background for Sarah Chaplin who lost her 49 year-old husband of 20 years and was caring for their five children who ranged from ages 1 to 14. Robert McKnight, who was born in Ireland in 1699, left a grieving widow, Maryann.
This is the kind of history our hilltop cemetery holds. There’s more work to be done there, and our restoration team will continue in warmer weather. There’s always room for more hands; righting stones is great exercise, and cleaning stones is an easy task that yields gratifying results.
