Greenwich News, Greenwich, Connecticut
Thursday, June 20, 1991
Caption: On guard for history -Hard work by a group of residents resulted in the restoration of burying Hill Cemetery. Efforts are now being made to keep it permanently maintained.
It was called Burying Hill Cemetery, but for years, it could easily have been mistaken for another nondescript track of vacant land. Some markers along Burying Hill Road that commemorated Greenwich's ancient dead were covered with weeds and tall grass. Sporadic attempts were made at clearing the cemetery, but for the most part they resembled less a historic landmark than a cluttered eyesore.
Then Valerie P. Storms, a Burying Hill Road woman and representative Town Meeting member from District 10, got a few of her neighbors together to restore the cemetery to something close to its former state. Now she hopes to keep it that way.
"What I am really interested in is a way to keep it maintained for a long time," Mrs. Storms said. "It's not that much work for anyone person, it's not that much money for any one person, if we can all just get behind it."
From the 1700s to the early 1800s, the triangular strip of land was used as a burial place for the first settlers of the Round Hill section of town. In all, there are about a few dozen gravestones at the site. A few have names carved in them, although most are plain fieldstones.
William Finch, the town historian, said the cemetery was likely in use since the founding of the Round Hill community in the early 1700s, and remained the community's burying place until it was supplanted by one at the First Church of Round Hill. At the time, Round Hill was a farming community, and stonemasons were expensive and far away. "The settlers had common stones," he said.
Not all the fieldstones may mark the remains of the Round Hill farmer. According to Jeffrey Mead, a local historian who specializes in old graveyards, some of the stones may mark the bodies of members of the British raiding party ambushed during the Revolutionary War.
The public appeal by Mr. Mead first moved Mrs. Storms to try to organize some type of cleanup effort for the graveyard. At the time, the cemetery was a little more than "a weed patch," she recalled, but she said she felt she could do something with the support of her neighbors.
While neighborhood aesthetics were an important consideration for Mrs. Storms, she added there were others as well.
"I feel some responsibility to the community where I live, whether it's Greenwich or a smaller community," she said. "Something that's got this much history tied up in it is very important. I think it's a real shame if you don't care about it."
In clearing out the land, Mrs. Storms was not alone. A Boy Scout group from Round Hill, Troop 37, helped out as well.
Anne Adler, a Lake Avenue who resident participated in the clean-up effort, said many of the fieldstone markers were not even visible when they started work, buried as they were beneath branches in other plant debris.
"This was in March, before the spring growth, so it was clearing out a lot of old dead stuff," she said. "Everyone got a good case of poison ivy."
Despite the pitfalls of such work, Mrs. Adler said the children involved, who range in age from 10 to 14, seemed to enjoy the work and learning about the cemeteries history. Stories about the possible British dead were particularly interesting to them, she said.
Mrs. Storms estimated that it will cost $100 a month just to keep the cemetery grass cut, plus other kinds of landscaping expenses. So far, the first-year funds for lawn cutting have already been raised. But she isn't sure about its long-term prospects. Twice as many people were contacted as actually offered some form of help, although she added no one was pressed to donate their time or money, and people who did not reply to an initial mailing asking for help were not contacted again.
"We're not going to go around dunning people," she said. "Once they didn't contact me after the first letter, I didn't bother them."
Mrs. Adler said she is enthusiastic about the prospects for continued care of Burying Hill Cemetery. The emergence of a Boy Scout troop in the community, she said, seems to provide a ready source of labor for an annual clean up the effort she anticipate would be necessary.
Susan Tritschler, director of the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich, expressed enthusiasm for the effort and added she hopes it will spread to other parts of town, where old community cemeteries like the one at Burying Hill are falling into neglect. "It takes other people like Val who are interested in history to start something like that, "she said.
Bill Slocum
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