I hope everyone had a pleasant and significant Memorial Day. It was by accident that I spent much of Saturday afternoon searching for grave sites in four of Cabot's seven cemeteries. A lady who lives somewhere in England emailed me a while back about her ancestors, the Stone family, who lived in Cabot. She requested photos of grave sites, and since I needed to take more of the Cabot oral history books to Julie at the hardware store in Cabot, I took along the list of relatives she'd sent and my maps, and made the rounds.

I'm always impressed at how well kept our cemeteries are. I'm pleased that they are living up to the high standard set by long-time sexton and my friend, Velma (Urban) Smith. Velma retired as sexton few years ago, but before she left, each of Cabot's cemeteries had undergone a complete transformation. Weeds and brush cut back, stones straight and cleaned, fences in good repair and painted, fountains operating, grass always cut, and flowers blooming. She also saw to it that every veteran's grave site was properly marked with a flag. Before she became sexton, nobody was quite sure which graves should be marked, but together Velma and I were able to list veterans back to the Revolution, and every grave had a flag.

I first stopped at the Plains Cemetery. I know just about every name in this small cemetery, although there are some new lots I so I'll need to update my maps. Some Joe's Pond folks have lots in this lovely little cemetery with its 360 degree view. On summer evenings, it's not unusual to find one or two cars parked by the cemetery to watch the sun set. It's a beautiful spot in the summer, but brutal in winter, with winds sweeping across the unprotected landscape, leaving bare ground in some spots and huge drifts of snow in other places.

As I walked among the stones I thought about the Memorial Day celebrations we had when I was a kid at the Plains School. If the weather was nice, we would sometimes walk to the cemetery to place flags and flowers at the grave sites. There would sometimes be parents to give us a ride, but if not, we didn't mind. Some years we had Memorial Exercises at school, and everyone in the neighborhood would come - mostly mothers, as all the dads were busy with spring work on the farms. I remember at least once we were invited to join with the village students, and we rode in the back of a big farm truck with a stake body. I remember the truck, but don't recall anything about the Memorial Day service. Memorial Day usually signaled the end of the school year, too, so I think the anticipation of summer vacation overshadowed the solemnity of honoring our dead soldiers.

The Village Cemetery is much larger than the Plains one, and there are few lots left. The oldest section is on the left of the first driveway, and that's where most of the markers were that I needed to photograph. The photo here shows an older section, but not the earliest, and more recent grave sites are beyond the brow of the hill. Land for a new section has been secured just beyond and to the right of this picture.

I got pictures of all the Stone family stones we have on record. Most were at Durant Cemetery. Col. John Stone and his neighbor, Elihu Coburn, each donated 1/4 acre of land in 1813 for this burial ground. More land was donated in later years, and one of the most charming features in this cemetery is the Jennie Gould Bruce Sunken Garden. It's located at the back of the cemetery next to the Winooski. The amphitheater-like banks were covered with flowers. I didn't go there on Saturday; the care takers were busily mowing to have it looking nice for the weekend, but I like to stop there once in a while. My grandparents and one set of great grandparents are buried in this cemetery, plus several of my aunts and uncles.

My last stop was the Center of Town Cemetery, a favorite spot of mine. It was the first cemetery in town, established in 1799 on an acre of land given by William Osgood. It turned out that Osgood was the first to be buried there, in 1801. Cabot's first school teacher, Joseph Smith is buried there, and many other first settlers. About 90 people were buried there before it was closed in 1846. By then most of the settlers had moved from this, the geographic center of town, down the hill to where the village is now. This marked the second move of the town's seat of government. (The original settlement was on the Plain, then known as Johnson's Plain, but that proved to be too harsh for most, thus the move to the Center of Town.) The meeting house, and other buildings were moved and relocated by the Winooski River, or as one old timer is quoted as remarking, "to the swamp."
Left behind were the stocks and the whipping post. A marker and mounds of earth are all that's left now, and the tidy little cemetery with fragile field stone markers where nine Revolutionary War veterans rest.