Good morning, blog watchers!

We're doing a little experiment today. Last night I posted a slide show of pictures we took at the Joe's Pond Association Baked Bean Supper. I have always used Flickr to make my slide shows, but we (especially Fred who has a keener eye for these things than I do) think the picture quality isn't as good as it could be. So we're asking you to compare the pictures posted last night with those on this new slide show using Photo Bucket:
New Slide Show

Let us know if they look better/worse or if there are any other problems or differences and if you prefer one over the other. Thanks for your input. Email us at jpwebmaster@fairpoint.net.

As long as I'm here, I'll just report that at 9 a.m. I measured another .10 in. of rain that had fallen in the past 24 hours. Right now it looks as if we could get another shower . . .

I thought I was going to a workshop on conservation of large paper collections at the Vermont Historical Society tomorrow, but that didn't pan out, so instead I'll be working on revising the map of the Cabot Plains Cemetery. Velma Smith and I mapped all the Cabot cemeteries about 10 years ago. There are seven of them. Unfortunately, not all grave sites have markers; not only that, some markers are at the front of the lot while others were placed at the back; and to make things even more complicated, a lot of the older burials were not arranged in straight lines - most were, but every now and again we find a bit of a zig-zag going on, who knows why - maybe there was a tree root or a boulder and rather than spend hours removing the obstacle, why not just move a little one way or another? Done! Fill it in and fifty years down the road, who's going to care?

You get the picture. Now, 50 or 100 years later, somebody does care. Current sexton is trying to locate space for new lots, sometimes for Joe's Pond families, and you can imagine her consternation and concern when her probe hits "something" where there is obvious vacant space and where the map shows no burial . . .

In our defense, Velma and I pretty much went by what we could see, although we knew there would be discrepancies because in doing the research I found a bunch of records of deceased with no indication where they were buried, records showing burials in a specific cemetery but where there were no markers, and a few dozen more very early ones we suspect were buried in a lot near wherever the family was living at the time. Like under the big maple tree at John "Woody" Woods' home. I'm sure I've told some of you about that - my grandfather used to own that property along the Bayley Hazen road and some years planted potatoes on that lower lot. Whatever he was doing on that land, everyone working there had strict orders not to disturb anything around that big maple tree because there were seven Webster family members buried there. I later found records of their deaths, and no records of burials in any of the seven Cabot cemeteries, so I have to believe my grandfather was absolutely right.

In the early years, there weren't any cemeteries. The first one in Cabot was at the Center of Town, and that was closed after only about 40 years when the town literally moved into the valley next to the Winooski River. Then the Lower Cabot Cemetery was opened, and the Village, and other smaller ones, but the farmers who lived outside of the village would have found it difficult, not to mention expensive and probably unacceptable to bury their family members anywhere but on their own land.

But, as they say, "I digress." Velma and I both knew there were anomalies in the mapping of the Plains Cemetery, but we were there in the fall, I think October, in a snow storm. It wasn't snowing anywhere else that day, just on Cabot Plain. We braved the wind and snowflakes as long as we could and decided to come back in the spring. Come May, there we were, bright warm sunshine, light breeze - and black flies. We stuck it out and thought we had it pretty close to correct, and I had the maps printed.

Turns out, because of the backside/frontside mixup with headstones, a couple partial rows are off. Marvie and her probe made the discovery last fall, but having had the wind and snow experience before, I was happy she was willing to wait until this summer to get it straightened out. We did that last week, and now I have to redraw the map and perhaps later this week Marvie, Velma and I will meet once more at the cemetery just to be sure we have it right this time. I look forward to going there again. It's a lovely spot for the cemetery, or just to be. The views are spectacular and on a hot summer day like when we were there last week, there's always a breeze. It's a peaceful spot except in the winter, and not hard to imagine the first settlers wanting to be there.

This picture was taken in early spring, looking west across the road from the cemetery to the Woodbury quarries and the Worcester Range. This is where the beautiful sunsets happen - and when you look east, there are the White Mountains and gorgeous sunrises. The view is a 360 degree delight, beautiful enough to take some of the sting out of remembering loved ones in the little cemetery on the Plain, and a fine spot to think of the history that was made on this very spot, where the historic Bayley-Hazen road turned northward opening the area to settlement.