CONDITION REPORT AND CONSERVATION PLAN, PLEASANT VALLEY CEMETERY, BOEDTKER ROAD IN THE TOWN OF SPRINGFIELD, VERMONT, USA

nigel copsey September, 2002

The cemetery at the end of Boedtker Road, and on the land of Old Woodland Farm, owned by Walter and Susan Richter, dates from the end of the Eighteenth Century. The earliest interment recorded on a surviving is that of Philarmon Robertson, who died in 1795, aged 7 years.

The cemetery is on high ground, and is bounded on three sides by locally quarried schist posts, each with two iron fixings which most likely carried timber rails which have long since rotted. On the fourth side is a frost-tumbled dry-stone .

The burial ground is now surrounded, and its fringes overhung, with mature trees, mainly pine and oak, with some maple and hickory.

The reafforestation of Vermont and the commensurate loss of pastureland has left many such cemeteries incongruously isolated and away from current centers of population. The dead-end lane that is today Boedtker Road was the main route south to Rockingham within living memory, the road passing around the east and south of Old Woodland Farmhouse.

The cemetery was the final resting place of the Woodward family, who built the first recorded building on the farm site, and of the Boedtkers as well as of the dead of many other families. Apart from the Boedtkers, the surnames would seem to be of universally British origin—Robinsons, Sheldons, Robertsons, Boyntons, Bates. This should be of no great surprise, of course. As little surprise, sad to say, as the high proportion of children buried here.

Contrary to English, and, indeed, normal Christian practice, all but the most recent face west instead of east, to the setting instead of the rising sun.

Where the subsidence of graves has not been filled in, it is evident that the grave is behind the headstone. Which is to say, the inscription faces away from, rather than across the grave, as in England.

The tombstones are a mixture of mainly C19 and , the earliest tending to be of slate; 1829 being the most recent of these. The slate stones are generally crudely cut, chiseled into shape, not sawn. The end grain is often plucked and rarely square to the face, although this latter detail may have been deliberate to allow quick drainage from the surface most vulnerable to frost damage. Typically, the are about an inch thick.

Slate was used commonly during the earlier settlement years: it was roughly quarried from locally occurring outcrops, being a material that split easily along cleavage planes. The extraction of useable material required no heavy plant or investment, it needed only and . This made it available to people who had little spare cash.

As industrialisation and greater personal wealth increased across Vermont, so marble became the material of choice. This enjoyed higher status; it was the product of capitalist endeavour, its production requiring a relatively high capital investment: it had to be quarried in large blocks, transported and reduced by the use of large mechanical saws. Only at this stage might it be masoned and carved. Either before or after lettering, marble headstones were then transported significant distances.

From 1866 onwards, it became common practice for the lettering of marble headstones to be sand-blasted. The raised letter tombstones were thus produced.

There are two Revolutionary soldiers buried in the cemetery.

The incised letters tend to be of some accomplishment— certainly the work of professional letter-cutters, clearly not ‘do it yourself’ work. All of the slates bar that of Philarmon Robertson, and perhaps the stone with simply ‘P H’ upon it are the work of the same hand.

The stone to Philarmon Robertson is probably the most notable in the cemetery. It displays a precise (if poorly spaced) ‘English Letter’ of the type that evolved within the craft in England during the Eighteenth Century. Lettercutting of the Georgian period in England has never been surpassed in its simple, trade-wide sophistication. It informed the design of several C18 type-faces, particularly Baskerville, the designer of which, John Baskerville, had begun his working life as a lettercutter. The Robertson stone is the only stone in the cemetery to carry this English letter—the other slate headstones display an idiosyncratic italic letter throughout— for names as well as additional text. Commonly at this time in England, italic letters were reserved for use upon these additional texts—poems or biblical references, and to the best of my knowledge were never used for the names of the deceased as they are here. This remains the convention within the trade today.

All the single hand slates have very shallow relief, often simply incised motifs: urns, weeping willows, unusual geometric grids and free-flowing leaf margins, usually incised. The Philarmon Robertson stone has an exquisite, naive flat relief cherub with scratched frizzy hair, as well as a painstakingly repeated ‘lozenge’ pattern to its border.

None of these slates are in any sense production-line headstones—their raw material was almost certainly ‘won’ and fashioned by the lettercutters themselves. They are humble, ‘frontier’ stones.

To speculate, it is tempting to believe that the Robertson stone was the work of an English-born mason, with some training in the craft gained in England. The other slate mason I would say is from without that craft tradition, quite possibly self-taught. ( See subsequent survey of Rockingham Burial Ground attached)

The earliest marble headstones (1814 maybe, certainly 1825, being to John W. Boynton) are typically around 2’ high and 15” wide. They are 1 ½-2” thick. The inspiration for their letters is universally that of the type-face. The letters are well-cut, by accomplished craftsmen, and display a range of fonts within any one inscription, with a mix of upper and lower cases as well as italic verse.

They might almost be at home in any English Victorian cemetery, except that on the vast majority the family name is in raised lettering, which is most uncommon in England, and there is an untypical precision as regards the age of many individuals down the years, months and days they lived.

These headstones will have been produced in the marble of Danby or West Rutland, quite possibly even lettered there, and the craftsmanship will reflect the backgrounds of the craftsmen. Very many were, of course, Italian at this time, and Scots.

These early marble stones are on the small side, reflecting perhaps the relative poverty of the purchasers, the difficulty and cost of transport, as well as the technological level of the quarries. It is likely that these stones are hand-squared and dressed—not sawn.

By the second half of the C19, the marble headstones become universally bigger—they are wider, higher and thicker and many have shaped tops. In Britain at this time, marble was also the stone of choice, but there stones displayed a lot of carved detail—masses of stone flowers and foliage within Gothick or elaborately shaped stones. All but one of the stones here are plain. Most are square. There are only 4 ogee tops, 4 segmental and a ½ dozen triangular.

So that whilst the bigger stones reflect advances in the stone- working industry—saws and better transport, as well as a greater affordability, there remains about these stones the austere taste of the settler and a complete lack of urban ostentation.

The inscriptions on the marble headstones remain fairly crisp and legible; the stone is clearly durable. There would seem to be little reason to doubt that this legibility will persist into the foreseeable future.

The first stone appears around 1958. There are ten granite headstones—all but three of these ( two are pink, one black) are grey Barre granite. All have letters that have been sandblasted through a template; all are standardized, mass- produced designs. They are typically 9” thick.

A significant number of stones have fallen, and/or broken. A few have been repaired using copper plates set across the break and to either side, held with copper bolts. This is an honest, elegant and efficient method of repair.

Conservation approach.

The historic character of this cemetery is reinforced by the relative lack of recent burials and, therefore, of modern headstones. The most recent stones are of Barre granite with letters hand-carved, although using pneumatic hammer and . (The pneumatic masons hammer was invented in 1896 by the Trow and Holden tool company of Barre, Vermont).

It is important that any policy in favour of continued interment within the bounds of this cemetery respects its historic character.

Ideally, burials would be allowed only in exceptional circumstances. If or when allowed, there should be a sensitive control placed upon the type and character of stones erected. It is the norm today for headstones to be of black or other imported , with garish sand-blasted images and etched, sandblasted lettering produced by computer programmes. These lack all trace of the human hand; all the little flaws of human endeavour that endow any human activity with its essential essence.

The proportions of most modern stones lack all elegance, being squat, designed to be fixed by one man and a sack truck, not out of aesthetic consideration.

The likely motive of any future burials would be the desire of the individual or of their family to partake, to be a part of, the power of place possessed by the Boedtker Road cemetery. It would be a great shame if their understandable aspiration was to be the cause of this undoubted power of place being disspated or destroyed by ugly, ill-considered and inappropriate headstones.

A suitable pre-condition for the erection of new stones might be that the headstone will be of Vermont stone (slate, marble or Barre granite); that its proportions should be in keeping with others on the site; that its lettering and carving detail should be restrained and, ideally, drawn and cut by hand. The skills to achieve such a project persist in Vermont: in West Rutland and in Barre.

New stones, however, should not be pastiche versions of the old. They should reflect their time without imposing that time upon the character of the cemetery as a whole. They should be sensitively and individually designed, not bought ‘off the peg’.

In England, it is common practice, if largely because of space pressure, for modern sections of cemeteries to be quite separate from historic sections. This preserves the aesthetic integrity of the old. Wherever this has not occurred, the beauty of the cemetery as a whole has been diminished and its cultural value seriously compromised.

The first repair principle must be that of minimum intervention.

Leaning headstones are part of the character of an old cemetery.

However, stones that are leaning beyond the ability of the ground to hold them should be lifted out and reset in similar fashion to the original method used to fix them. The soil hereabouts is fine and sandy, and dries out in the summer. In the winter it freezes and thaws, of course.

Stones that are leaning backwards and presenting their inscriptions to the rain and the snow should be set more or less upright. There can be no virtue in allowing the erosion of the inscriptions to be accelerated.

When stones are reset, they should be carefully set aside and their footings excavated. This will determine the method of their fixing. The slates and many of the marble stones are set straight into the ground. This is the most common method in England. Approximately one third of the stone should be beneath ground. Stones and earth should be tamped around the stone. Some of the marble headstones are set into marble plinths, in sockets.

The stone and the plinth should be set aside and a hole some 12” to 18” deep excavated and its bottom well tamped (ooooo missus!) before being progressively back-filled with hardcore. The plinth should then be set roughly level with at least half of its height below finished ground level. The plinth socket should then be wetted and a relatively squishy lime and sand mix spread evenly within it. The headstone should then be restood, the base pointed fully with a stiffer lime and sand .

There are a number of broken stones. Some of them are simply too degraded now to cope with being reassembled. In most cases, however, repair is a feasible option. Whilst the copper plate repairs are good exemplars, an alternative method would be to drill stainless steel dowel into the opposing sections, setting these in a of NHL 3.5 and pressing the two sections together on a bed of the same grout. After the repair has set, the joint might be pointed with a fine mortar of NHL 2.0 and marble dust.

All headstones should be checked for stability. There have been many botched and improvised repairs to these stone over the years. Unsightly or potentially damaging repairs should be removed and more sympathetic solutions applied as necessary.

As a matter of regular maintenance, small leaning stones might be brought more or less upright with a minimum of effort and the ground tamped around their new position.

No cleaning should be carried out. All typical cleaning agents contain salts or acids, both of which are damaging to marble.

Lichen is to be encouraged.

A mapping of the cemetery should be carried out, with all stones marked and recorded; the type of stone noted and the names inscriptions taken down.

Stones currently at risk/priorities for attention:

Hiram Britton/ Harriet Burt, SE corner,

Sarah Burt, Oria Perry, SE

Jotham Hopkins/ Esther Way, James Perry, W center

Phoebe/John Boynton, NW. These are two stones that shared a common plinth which has tipped and allowed the stones to fall backwards. They would appear to have subsequently been dug into the ground. This leaves them unduly vulnerable to frost damage when they are wet, and to the penetration of ground salts, the crystallization of which within the marble would cause significant surface damage. They should be raised and reset in their plinth.

Nigel Copsey, 13. 09.02.

Accredited member, Institute of Conservation.