"There I Find My Treasure All Awaiting"

from a gravestone, Carpenter Hill Cemetery, VT

The preservation of local history is an important part of the educational process at Guilford School. Over the last several years, with the assistance and guidance of Guilford Cementery Commissioner Eric Morse, our students have worked in a number of our cementeries collecting data and information. There are more than 16 cemeteries in our rural Vermont town. The epitaphs and personal information contained on many grave stones, and the stones themselves, are fast deteriorating. Students and adult volunteers have provided the people power to begin collecting this valued and threatened part of our local heritage. The article below was written in response to a day spent working on this ongoing service learning project.

Uncovering History at Carpenter Hill Cemetery

by Susan Hessey, GCS Librarian/Media Specialist

The preparations for the Memorial Day Service activities are a blur; most of us on the teaching staff were buried in the early stages of final student assessments, schedules disrupted by such end-of-the-year activities as Field Day, individual class field trips, and sticky, humid weather. Somehow the planning group managed to organize activities, groups, adult facilitators which were needed to make the day work and get them distributed on time. The day before our big day I had an on-the-fly consultation with Eric Morse in which we further developed a data collection form for the Carpenter Cemetery group, and I crammed to prepare the story that was to be part of the Service Day All School Meeting.

I had been told that Guilford resident Bob Gaines planned to speak about Flanders Fields as a way of explaining the significance of Memorial Day poppies to our student community. I searched high and low for a story about poppies to compliment his remarks, and finally remembered a favorite from my childhood from a book called Poppy Seed Cakes by Margery Clark. My copy of the book, a recent gift from fellow librarians who knew of its importance to me and had discarded it from their collection, is a well-loved first edition which features original woodcuts on each page and is printed on the glorious thick paper of the forties which grows soft and furry after countless readings.

I remember reading another copy of The Poppy Seed Cakes from my home-town public library as a child, and spent many hours in reverie with the book on my lap. I remembered people long gone, looked in photograph albums at pictures of relatives and friends of the family who fought in World Wars One and Two, and thought about how lucky I was to spend most of my young years in one home. Though that home is now gone, those years left me with a strong sense of place. I think this is something that Guilford's children feel, too.

After the meeting, the townspeople, parents, staff, students and teachers who had gathered for Service Day separated into small groups. I boarded a bus with many students and a handful of adults. We went up to Carpenter Hill Cemetery where pairs of students - olders partnered with youngers - went about the business of choosing a gravestone and taking the information which appeared there down onto a form. They were encouraged to transcribe all they could, from written information to drawings of the layout, shape and decorative elements of the stones. They were immediately absorbed. It was one of those magical situations where conflict was absent: each pair moved around the graveyard and seemed drawn to a stone or stones. They shared the tasks of transcription, reading aloud, writing and pointing out subtleties to one another.

One pair, a sixth grade boy paired with a second grade boy, found a very old stone. As they looked at the words carved on the grave's marker, they realized that the information was obscured by lichen, discoloration, and a too-healthy thatch of grass which had grown up over the bottom line or two. The older boy, who has been known to push limits in a classroom setting, dropped to his knees and gently began to pry the triangle of grass at the base away in an effort to reveal the hidden words. Even when he moved the grass away, taking care not to uproot it, the words were too difficult to read. He and his partner called over to me, asking whether any water was available. It was a hot day, threatening showers, and I assumed they wanted drinks. But this was not the case. He had realized that wetting the stone would make the color more uniform and perhaps enable them to clear enough debris from the stone's surface to make it legible.

I brought over a sport bottle full of water from the school bus and he and his partner slowly dribbled it over the inscription on the stone. They rubbed the lichen away with gentle fingertips, and "read" the stone with both eyes and hands, from the top to the very bottom in the little crevice they had made between stone and grass. They were able to transcribe the whole thing. When they finished, the older boy carefully pressed the grass back into place. I'm sure he was unaware that anyone was watching. Somehow the need for respecting this resting place was very clear.

Elsewhere in the cemetery other teams learned about "their" people - a former governor of Vermont, children younger than themselves who had died too young and women identified only as someone's wife. They carefully wrote down the bits of information on the stones. Up on the top of the rise a new stone marked the grave of a second grade student from our school who died only a year before. Some of the students found her grave, some didn't. No one made a big deal about it, but somehow Becky's presence seemed to color the hour and a half we spent there. It was safe, quiet, intriguing, real, and sad.

We left, swatting black flies and chatting about our discoveries. When we returned to school, bus load after bus load went right back to their rooms to write reflections of their experience. The school was full of people, some back from cemeteries, some from gardening, some from making art at various locations in town. The air surrounded us, filled with the same purposeful quiet we had experienced at Carpenter Hill. We sat at desks, curled on the floor, wherever we were comfortable and scrawled away on our papers. Everyone had things to write about, and these things spilled out of our hands almost of their own volition. We were there in the day, in our town, learning and all together.