Town Historian Mary Donohue has completed her series of guides to West Hartford’s historic cemeteries, with a self-guided tour of notables and memorials in North Cemetery as the final installment.

By Ronni Newton

West Hartford Town Historian Mary Donohue has been developing a unique commemoration of West Hartford’s contributions to the country’s history, and in August introduced the third installment in her series of guides to the town’s historic cemeteries – this one focused on North Cemetery, which is the final resting place for not only some of the most famous former West Hartford residents, but also those who were buried in the unmarked Potter’s Field area.

Earlier this year Donohue debuted the first of three planned brochures – a guide to “Notables and Memorials” in Fairview Cemetery. For the second brochure, she took on the task of creating a guide to the town’s oldest cemetery, the Old Center Burying Ground. Donohue estimates that overall she spent more than 300 hours on the project. The self-guided tours are one of the initiatives of West Hartford’s America 250 Task Force, which included a series of educational and cultural programs focused on and celebrating the town’s unique contributions to the state as well as the nation leading up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th.

As she approached the project, Donohue said each of the guides presented its own unique challenge.

North Cemetery, located at 80 North Main Street, was established in the early days of the American Republic and used throughout the Victorian period. It’s already on the National Register of Historic Places, but there’s no comprehensive list of who is buried there, Donohue said in an interview with We-Ha.com.

“North Cemetery, even though it’s been the subject of ‘Hauntings,’ still has a lot of untold history,” she said, referencing the Noah Webster House and West Hartford Historical Society’s annual spooky and theatrical cemetery tour featuring “historical mysteries” that takes place each October.

As part of her research, Donohue said she started walking through the cemetery, looking for interesting and artistic memorials as well as names that she recognized. She reviewed roughly 1,600 photos on “find a grave” sites, and looked up obituaries, which often led to dead ends.

There were successes, Donohue said, but they weren’t always easy finds. She did a lot of walking and searching to find the monument to William Thomas Sedgwick, the namesake of Sedgwick Middle School, who is No. 2 on the self-guided tour – right after the first stop, at the raised tomb of Rev. Nathan Perkins, his wife, Catherine Pitkin Perkins, and their daughter, Julia Perkins, who are buried in the oldest 1790 section in the southwest corner of the cemetery.

The cemetery includes 32 known Revolutionary War veterans and at least 40 Civil War veterans. “Many people might be surprised that West Hartford has a Civil War Memorial,” Donohue said. “There was so much carnage, and it was such a huge war that many families never got much closure,” she said. The memorial is a Cenotaph, and on the west side commemorates those who were never brought back to their families for burial, with a listing of 10 names. It was dedicated in 1904 by William Hall, who served as chairman of the Cemetery Committee, and on the east side includes quotes from Thomas O’Hara’s “The Bivouac of the Dead.”

The brochure also reveals the stories of James Pine and Mary Louise Lisbon, members of the Black community whose lives were lived with agency, expertise, and community, and Kate E. Griswold, the nationally known pioneering woman publisher of “Profitable Advertiser,” a trade journal that was in existence from 1895-1909 and had offices in Boston and New York.

Brett Freiburger from the West Hartford Public Library’s Local History Room, contributed information about Pine (1839-1907), who was a free-born Black man, a published poet, and a pastor. He was also the sexton for First Church and worked as a gravedigger at the cemetery. The Pine family, the brochure notes, lived in West Hartford until the 1950s.

Donohue said perhaps the saddest thing about North Cemetery is Potter’s Field. “Town governments are responsible for burying indigent individuals. Black and white residents alike were interred in this plot through the 1950s,” the brochure states. She said one day she would like to unravel who is buried in the Potter’s Field, where there are no markers.

North Cemetery was a focal point of West Hartford’s Memorial Day parade from the early 1900s through 1963, the site of speeches and commemorations. But there were no burials by the end of the 1890s because at that point the remaining land, in the northwest corner, was too wet. In 1894, Hall, as the chairman of the Cemetery Committee, bought land from the former Pond Estate to establish Fairview Cemetery.

“I don’t think it’s just nostalgia,” Donohue said of the project. Cemeteries are beautiful places to walk, and the brochures are a way of telling the stories of those who are buried there.

Members of the town’s America 250 committee were invited to attend the ceremony introducing the final brochure, as a wrap-up to their work.

Online self-guided tour brochures are available on the Town of West Hartford’s and the Noah Webster House’s websites. Printed copies are available at the Noah Webster House and the West Hartford Cemetery Office at Fairview Cemetery.

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