Last year, a Phippsburg Elementary School student announced to his teacher, Merry Chapin, “I just thought Phippsburg was this boring old town. I didn’t know it was so interesting.” The admirable change of heart had been kindled by work on the Phippsburg Cemetery Project, an effort to reclaim long neglected family cemeteries scattered throughout the town peninsula.
Of course older volunteers, who have spent many hours restoring 25 of the over 100 known small graveyards, were aware Phippsburg had an interesting history, but they too have been fascinated to learn more. As they have unearthed gravestones that tell stories about when and how people died, and then have learned additional circumstances from descendants and through research, they’ve become hooked. They can’t wait to see what the next plot will reveal.
During the past five years, these intrepid people have swatted black flies and mosquitoes and hacked their way through poison ivy to dig out cemeteries covered over with bushes, brush, leaves and other debris. With the help of a tractor donated and run by Mickey Varian (the extended Varian family has been the mainstay of the project), they have pulled up trees and stumps, and then glued and re-set stone markers and re-built fences and stone walls.
The project began when Jesse Varian Sutfin and her husband, Doug, and other members of the Varian family decided to step up their maintenance of the Bartlett Cemetery, which is located on the Sutfins’ property and had been cared for by Jesse Sutfin’s grandparents. (Several in town are similarly maintained by the people who own the land where they are located.) As their work progressed, the Varians and Chapin, who saw a great opportunity to spark 5th and 6th grade students’ interest in Phippsburg history, became more interested in the numerous overgrown cemeteries all over the town, some discovered in the woods by hunters and ATV riders in areas where abandoned roads were once dotted with sparsely scattered homes. The Varians obtained information from the Maine Old Cemetery Association on how best to proceed. One restoration led to another, and as they progressed, stories began to surface.
When they cleared out and reset the stone of Sarah Wallace’s solitary grave, dated 1872, near the entrance to Sebasco Resort beside the golf course, a Phippsburg resident told them his father had cautioned, “You always tip your hat to Sarah when you’re golfing.” As they worked on the Darling Cemetery at Black’s Landing, they discovered that many broken pieces of headstones were missing because in the past, lobstermen had used them to weight their traps. While clearing out one of the next sites, the Gilman/Lewis/Sprague Cemetery, a member of the Gilman family told them about the sad fate of Katie Gilman, age 1 year, 11 months, who was scalded to death when she climbed up on the kitchen counter on washday and fell out of the window into the wash water.
In 2002, volunteers began their most ambitious project to date, restoring the Blethen Cemetery located on the ridge of Hidden Mountain behind Hidden Mountain Cottages and Gift Shop owned by Lucrecia Gilman on Route 209.
There, they toiled for months to clear the plot, glue broken stones, re-set all the stones and to locate, clean, rebuild and repaint the ornate wrought iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. Jesse Sutfin’s mother, Marie Varian, says the fence was broken up and scattered, much of it buried by debris, and the gates were either down or totally covered over. “We couldn’t find one gate,” she says, “until I was walking in an area and felt it sinking, and there was the gate in one piece.”
Jamie Gilman, stepson of Lucrecia Gilman, welded together all the pieces of the fence they had found, and Fitz Sargent fashioned the missing pieces from aluminum donated by residents or re-claimed from the town dump and melted down at Gilman’s shop. Now that the 10 stones are re-set and the fence is freshly painted, Sutfin says they consider the site their “showpiece cemetery.”
After school, on weekends and during the summer, Merry Chapin’s students helped out at the Hidden Mountain Cemetery and at several others, clearing brush and debris under the supervision of adults. The Varians emphasize that it is very important that a cemetery not be disturbed until a person experienced in re-claiming sites has a chance to evaluate it and note where stones belong. “At one cemetery,” Sutfin says, “all the markers had been neatly placed against a tree by some well-meaning person. But then, we didn’t know where they should go.”
Chapin’s students, who have created a web page that tells about their cemetery work, also visited the Sagadahoc History and Genealogy Room at the Patten Free Library and Phippsburg’s Historical Society and Totman Library to learn about the families whose names appear on gravestones. That piece of the project, says Chapin, unearthed as many tantalizing mysteries as it did answers.
One mystery surfaced in the Hogan family cemetery next to the school. After the stones were cleaned up, the students discovered that just two months after Angelia Hogan died in 1860 at age 25, her sisters, Marie and Augusta, died. Although research has turned up reasons for other deaths so close together, they haven’t found any information on the Hogans. “It’s frustrating,” says Chapin. “We just can’t find any more records.”
Still, the students and the Varians, who continue to ask Phippsburg residents whose ancestors are buried in the cemeteries to relate stories handed down in their families, have discovered other pieces of Phippsburg history. One is the sad tale of the Blethen family members who lived on Hunger Mountain, now known as Merritt Mountain. After a fire left them destitute, they were given barrels of food, which turned out to have been contaminated by rats that carried a form of plague. All family members died.
On a lighter side, Arlene Hamill told them that when she was a little girl, she escaped from a bull that was chasing her by taking refuge inside the wrought iron fence that encloses Hidden Mountain Cemetery.
Many headstone inscriptions bear witness to Phippsburg’s strong connection to the sea, among them, “Elijah Hutchins, lost at sea at age 22 in 1849 when the ship Hanover was wrecked off Hunnewell Beach; Fred Lewis, a Grand Banks fisherman who died in 1931; Capt. Frank Wyman, lost at sea in 1899 at age 39. There are those whose lost their lives in wars, like William Wyman, who died in the Revolutionary War, and James Perry, son of William Perry and Thankful Sprague, member of the Civil War 21st Maine Regiment.
Rumor has it that an Indian burial mound is located on Small Point, but the town’s oldest recorded cemetery is the Dromore Burial Ground, 1743, located beside Route 209 across from Dromore Bay. Graves from the 1700s have also been found in the Wyman Cemetery on Small Point. Most of the cemeteries are small, with two to 10 or 15 graves. The largest, with roughly 148 graves, is a town cemetery located on property at North Creek Farm where the Main Road used to be located. Volunteers have not yet re-claimed it, but that project is in the works.
Funding for the project has been spotty, and there is a great need for more. Early on, Chapin obtained a one-time grant from the Maine Community Foundation. The Maine Old Cemetery Association continues to chip in after a restoration has been completed. Elementary school students have run bake sales. Otherwise, the project has subsisted on donations of goods and materials like Gene Coffin’s donation of all the crusher dust used to re-set the stones, and loads of artificial flowers given by R. M. Tates, and gas, use of chain saws and other tools by volunteers.
Once cemeteries are restored, they need to be mowed and trimmed, a job that takes time from the trained people who could otherwise start out on a new site. “It’s a perpetual job,” says Jesse Sutfin. She hopes more townspeople will adopt and care for their family cemeteries. “Or,” she says, “if they don’t have one with their own ancestors, they can adopt another. We could clean it up and get the stones repaired, and then they could take over.”