Hurricane Sandy was not the first storm to wreak havoc in the Harvard Shaker cemetery. The Great Hurricane of 1938 blew down a deciduous tree that had been growing since Shaker times, leaving 25 empty spaces where metal markers once stood. A photo taken before the 1938 hurricane shows the tree. The cemetery totaled 319 metal and stone markers when the last Shaker was buried in 1929.
For the last two years, amidst much talk about what to do about the Shaker cemetery, I have repeatedly argued that falling trees pose the most significant threat to the Shaker cemetery.
The Cemetery Commission recently ribboned eight huge pine trees for removal. The tree that snapped was one of them, causing damage from row 4 through row 10, displacing seven markers. One marker is still intact, four broke in half, and two broke into several pieces. All have been removed from the cemetery except for one pinned under the fallen tree.
Harvard’s history shows that natural disasters can bring about needed change for the cemetery. In 1870, all the burying grounds in the 18 Shaker villages were deteriorating. The brethren of Mount Lebanon, the seat of the lead ministry, designed and developed a low-cost solution for renovating crumbling stone grave markers: the cast metal marker.
A few villages tried out one or two markers, but none converted an entire cemetery. All the villages were plagued by far more pressing problems, like population decline, particularly among the brethren. Harvard became the one and only village that managed to renovate its graveyard with the new-style metal tablets.
A brush fire swept through the Shaker graveyard in the winter of 1878, leaving it filled with debris and tarnished stones. When a revered eldress of the church family, Caroline King, died in November of 1878, the debris still littered the cemetery. Her roommate and companion of 40 years, Susan Channel, could not bear to have King’s final resting place a mess, and she spearheaded a movement to clean up the burying ground. With the help of Mary Hill, Elijah Myrick, and Channel, the village commissioned pressed metal tablets with all the names of those Shakers buried in the graveyard. The tablets arrived in October of 1879, and the conversion of the cemetery was completed two months later.
It is worth mentioning that Eldress Caroline King and four other Shakers are regularly remembered today with potted flowers. Eldress Caroline had welcomed a destitute Irish family into the community in 1834. The mother named her newborn Caroline King Meehan in gratitude. Several days ago, wading through the debris from the fallen tree, I found potted flowers scattered about. Each was labeled with a name, one of the direct descendants of Caroline King Meehan. It was gratifying to be able to set something right in the chaos.
Harvard was the first of only four villages to renovate its cemetery, but the only one to use the metal markers. The other Shaker cemeteries continued to deteriorate. By 1900, Mount Lebanon advocated a new cost-effective policy to deal with deteriorating cemeteries: pull up all markers and replace them with one single-stone monument. Eleven family and village cemeteries followed this path. This solution to the problem of cemetery maintenance is still endorsed today by Brother Arnold and the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
Many townspeople have inquired whether the broken markers or tablets can be repaired. Recent events tell us the answer is “yes.”
The Cemetery Commission has put in place a somewhat controversial policy for cleaning up the peeling, rusted, and often illegible markers. The tablets and their sticks are sand-blasted, heated, and powder-coated by Jeff Gould of Central Mass Powder Coating in Clinton.
Gould ran a pilot test five or six years ago with several markers. At the time, the Historical Commission questioned the process, especially the possibility that the markers could be damaged by the high heat to which they were subjected. The project was put on hold until the summer of 2011, when the Cemetery Commission again began to institute its renovation program.
It is not my place to comment on possible heat damage. However, something interesting came to light. The cleaning process revealed that many of the markers had already been repaired by welding in at least three separate periods in the past, including quite a few located close to the tree that fell during the 1938 hurricane. Gould thinks some of the oldest repairs took place before 1900, when a slightly different welding process was used. Seventy-six markers have been cleaned and powder-coated to date.
Gould also observed that the alloy the Shakers used for the cast iron, in keeping with their interest in quality, was superior to other cast-metal grave markers he has worked with from the Civil War period.
Since 1879, when the cast-metal markers were placed, the Shaker cemetery has been a favorite spot for both Shaker visitors and townspeople. When the community closed in 1918, residents of South Shaker Road and the Harvard Woman’s Club took charge of maintenance and upkeep, although the Shakers retained ownership of the cemetery property itself.
The Harvard bicentennial of 1932 stirred pride and interest in the town’s history and the Shaker village, too. Harvard historian Elvira Scorgie and several others made a row list of the Shaker cemetery markers, which is now located at the Harvard Historical Society. The Cemetery Commission and I also have copies of this list.
In January of 1940 the town of Harvard purchased the Shaker cemetery property from the Shakers, thereby saving the Shaker cemetery from the single-monument demise.
It is timely to address the cemetery’s problems: the removal of the trees and cleaning the markers. The brush fire of 1878 provided the opportunity for the Shakers to convert to cast-metal markers. The hurricane of 1938 provided the opportunity for the town to purchase the Shaker cemetery and assume responsibility for its care and upkeep.
The Cemetery and Historical commissions realize that they must work together. The overall plan proposed by the Cemetery Commission is to remove all the markers, wait for the ground to freeze, and remove the other large pine trees, then refurbish the markers with Gould and reset them in the spring.
I would also recommend removing all the trees in the cemetery proper and offering an incentive for the return of missing markers. About 65 markers out of the original 319 are missing. Twenty-five markers vanished in 1938. Some of the remaining 40 sit in people’s basements, taken to preserve them or as hapless trophies.
The Shaker cemetery is an historical treasure worthy of preservation.
Still River resident Roben Campbell is an expert on the South Shaker Road Shaker Cemetery. She received an award last year at the Enfield Shaker Seminars for her research, which revealed a previously unknown pattern to the burials.
