Sharon’s past comes alive on cemetery stroll

SHARON — Cemeteries are complicated places. Some head for the gravestones to mourn, others to enjoy a weekend stroll, and still others use them as scenic locales to contemplate time and history. They are somber, joyous, meditative and beautiful places, but they are also more than that, as Housatonic Heritage Walk through Sharon’s picturesque Hillside Cemetery on Saturday, Sept. 20 decisively demonstrated.

Studying cemetery inscriptions, and the story of the people behind them, is an act of respecting the history of a place, said Sharon Burying Ground (as it was formerly known) board member and veteran grave cleaner Jake Fricker. Fricker said the grave cleaning team, wryly called the “Hillside Stoners,” has cleaned somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 stones, with some 3,000 left to go. Each one, Fricker said, is “a way to honor the dead and remember the dead.”

Saturday’s tour, which took place during stunning fall weather, was a veritable journey through the lives of Sharon’s long departed. The Historical Society’s curator Cooper Sheldon, assisted by Hillside Stoners and Historical Society board members Myra Plescia, Marel Rogers, BZ Coords and Fricker, led the group from headstone to headstone, recounting the lives both happy and sad, prosperous and poor of the residents of yore, some well-documented and others whose stories have been mostly lost to time.

The first stop took the group to the elegant stone of Rev. Cotton Mather Smith (d. 1806), who was ordained the third minister of Sharon Congregational Church in 1755. He went on to found the Sharon Literary Club in 1777, which is believed to have been the first club of its kind in the country.

Further ambling took the group to Dr. Jerome Chaffee’s burial site, who founded Sharon Hospital in 1909, before the procession arrived at Judson Bostwick’s stone.

“There you have Mr. Mousetrap,” said Myra Plescia as she idly picked lichen of the grave, which sat pale and proud under dappled shade from one of the cemetery’s many towering Norway spruces towering above.

Bostwick led a short but industrious life, dying from typhoid fever at the age of 42 in 1859. His most lasting contribution to Sharon — and the world — was an early version of a mousetrap that would enclose the animal in a wooden cage of sorts before it was presumably released later elsewhere.

This surprisingly humane version of the now-ubiquitous pest control contraption was the first to be manufactured and marketed broadly in the world, the members of the Historical Society claimed. While this is difficult to substantiate, a quick google search yields that the earliest patent dates for the far-crueler spring-loaded traps only start appearing years after Bostwick died.

Further down the hill, a cluster of gravesites hosting the Marckres family shows George’s stone, who was probably Sharon’s first resident photographer and founded a jewelry store.

A more somber interlude of the journey was a visit to a shady, nondescript portion of the cemetery far downhill, arrayed with a smattering of small, barely visible and headstones that each bear only a number. Sheldon explained that this section is marked simply as “paupers” in a layout map from the 1800s, and scant information regarding its inhabitants exists. One stone, which apparently marks a child’s grave, is overlaid with toys.

“It’s not much to look at but it’s one of the saddest parts of the cemetery,” said Sheldon.

A later stop brought the group to Sarah Juckett’s gravesite, who was an ailing wife and mother on West Woods Road and who apparently also “churned a heck of a lot of butter.” She lived a painful life, often resorting to the pain-killing qualities of laudanum before dying at 43 years old in 1888. She kept a detailed journal between 1878 and 1881 about farm life, which has been a valuable resource for the historical society.

“She rests in peace here,” said Rogers.

Grave cleaning is a constant, meticulous and delicate task, the members of the Hillside Stoners explained, but it helps keep the vibrant and surprising history of the town alive. The team uses lichen-eating biologic cleaners to do the brunt of the work, then do the fine tuning with a gentle brush.

The only type of brush that’s allowed, Fricker said, is one “that would clean your Lamborghini.”

With three thousand headstones to go, and older cleans needing updating, the group has a big task ahead. “We’re doing this until we become members of this place,” said Fricker with a chuckle.