A Quaker Cemetery

There is significant overlap in the surnames of the Episcopal Cemetery and the nearby, contemporary Quaker cemetery. To begin with, there are plenty of Sarleses in both. It's a reasonable guess that many of the Episcopalians and Quakers who shared surnames were actually relatives, perhaps even close relatives. Certainly, some of the people buried in the Episcopal Cemetery were Quakers, had been Quakers, or came from Quaker families, such as Charles Haight and Phebe Chase Greene.

Thorn seems to be a very common name in the Quaker cemetery, although I don't know whether there is any relation to Stephen Thorn (my guess: probably).



Coincidentally, Rose is also a very common name in the cemetery. Below you can see one of the very rare examples of decoration on the stones (the fact that I took so many pictures of the decorated stones makes the decoration seem less rare than it really is). The graves of Walton and Phebe Rose are engraved with their initials: WR and PUR. 

While the grave of Grace and Oscar Rose is marked with a Masonic symbol.

As you can see, the cemetery is quite overgrown, with some stones stranded in a sea of brush and debris. While this isn't good for the preservation of the stones, there's a certain beauty to the overgrowth. In some places, it's wild and lovely, with a fairy-tale sort of feel. It also serves as a physical manifestation of time.



Full disclosure: I came to this cemetery a lot when I was a child. You might say it was my first cemetery. So the landscape brings me back to that time when I was genuinely afraid of getting lost if I wandered too far out into what looked to me like a wilderness.



Still, the cemetery could probably use some work. Graves have been tossed around by this mutilated tree ...

... and many stones would benefit from a good cleaning.

Here you can see a child's grave that seems to match two child's graves in the Episcopal Cemetery: this one of John Howard and this one of George Henry and Lewis Seaman. It stands to reason that the Episcopalians and the Quakers would have bought gravestones from the same workshops.

On the other hand, the Quakers certainly did prefer their stones to be plainer, in general, than the Episcopalians did. During my brief time at the cemetery, I didn't see a single urn or willow, the hallmarks of mid-nineteenth-century gravestone decoration. I did see the rare ornamental flourish, such as the examples above and below:

I also didn't see any old sandstone graves with cherub faces, despite the fact that the Meeting dates back to the eighteenth century. I assume the reason is either 1) I missed them or 2) the Quakers weren't using gravestones at this time. Many eighteenth-century Quakers didn't use gravestones out of the belief that they were ostentatious. Others used extremely plain or blank stone markers. Some Quaker Meetings that had gravestones had them removed in the course of the eighteenth century.

These stones seemed to date from the mid-nineteenth century up to the present, with the best preserved stones being the granite markers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some stones were inscribed with the months in their Quaker form - that is, First Month instead of January.

Below are the stones that most fascinated me as a child. I thought they were doors that you could open into the underworld. It turns out I wasn't far off. I don't know what these stones are about - are they the lids of stone tombs that go down into the earth, or are they just markers placed on top of the earth? - but the basic visual and symbolic idea underlying the gravestone is that of a door. That is why some gravestones - mostly early ones like this - have architectural features like those you might find on a door (i.e., lunettes or tympanums).


While most of the gravestones are plain and undecorated, quite a few are massive. Take a look at this row of Sarleses, lined up right along the brim of the hill. They're quite impressive.



More Sarleses, of the same time period:

And here are some Underhills. That stone wall in the background could easily be as old as the cemetery itself.

Like the Episcopal cemetery, the Quaker cemetery has had some repairs done, but probably not recently. Broken stones have been fixed, and old stones have been placed on new bases.

Unlike the Episcopal cemetery, the Quaker cemetery is spread out. There are large open spaces in between the clusters of graves. In some places, the ground is level, and in other places it slopes dramatically. There are a lot of trees, a lot of weeds, and a lot to discover.

Lastly, here are the beautiful graves of the Quinbys and the Purdys, which are nestled into the roots of a tree. They're from the 1920s or '30s. The latest grave I saw today dated from 2009.