Sometimes a cemetery reads like a road map. I often walk the aisles of New England’s ancient graveyards where brownstone, granite, slate and marble monuments are engraved with names as familiar to me as those of my neighbors. I might not know anyone called Hollister, Talcott, or Nye, but those monikers are frequently in mind. I see them all the time. They are emblazoned on street signs. I drive on roads that remind me of these early colonial families, clues to a past that most people don’t even know exists.
I’d long had a notion of graveyard as gazetteer, but it hit me with particular force when visiting the Old Eastbury Burying Ground in Glastonbury, Connecticut. It’s a relatively small cemetery that until little more than two hundred years ago was associated with a church that stood across the street. It’s a simple country graveyard in a suburbanizing area, the stones skewed with centuries of frost and often splotched with gray-green lichen. There hasn’t been a burial since the Civil War era.
My wife Mary and I walked slowly on uneven ground of sparse grass and moss. We paid our respects to veterans of the Revolution, and were awed by the skill of long-ago carvers whose pinwheels, scrollwork and haunting profiled faces are a high art too little admired. But as we read epitaphs of long years and accomplishments, or lives tragically cut short, I felt an eerie acquaintance with the surnames engraved on the stones. An unease percolated in my mind, but Mary didn’t feel it. Then I realized that having once lived just a couple miles away, these names were as familiar as a commute to work, trip to the grocery, or drive to visit friends. I knew these names not as people, but as places, as roads that took me where I needed to go.
Old Eastbury has about a score more than 300 known graves. By my rough count, there are 58 different family names, a remarkable 23 of which are also local street names. These range from Griswold Street, which has a busy corner with a shopping center and chain drugstore, to Goodale Hill Road, part of which passes through a state forest. Wickham Road pours out onto a well trafficked state road in front of the sprawling modern high school. Hubbard Street hosts eighteenth century houses and the historical society. Risley Street runs in an area of modest homes on small lots, while Weir Street passes larger residences on wooded parcels.
There’s one thing all these streets have in common. They would amaze their namesakes. None of those interred in Old Eastbury would be familiar with asphalt pavement and utility poles with wires let alone the size, style, and density of homes and commercial establishments along the roads. They’d be gobsmacked at the speed and frequency of traffic moving without horses. It’s possible that, afflicted with future shock, some might want their names removed from maps and signs.
In a very practical and obvious way, roads lace a community together. In fact, they facilitate community because they enable people to meet and enjoy each other’s company, perform civic activities, engage in commerce, and support other collective and interactive functions that mark a good place to live. Built over time, the roads by their direction of travel, connectivity, and names form a serendipitous biography of a place. They beckon us to explore not only their route, but the roots of their origins and names. There are stories to be found in our local roads, and if we ignore them, we cheat ourselves of knowledge that can enrich life in even the most ordinary place.
I spark with joy in “aha” moments when I connect names carved in stone along a grassy cemetery lane to a sign on a street corner not far away. Curiosity gains the upper hand, and my mind travels in time and space. After exploring the link between grave and road, my world grows larger and often some fascinating fact comes to mind, like a long-lost artifact retrieved from the bottom of the ocean.
The road network faintly echoes the web of social, political, and familial connections among early residents. It is a final memorial to the intimacy these people had with a landscape from which they wrested a living. It’s a phenomenon never to be repeated. New roads will be named. Existing roads may be renamed for prominent local people of a later era, or in homage to celebrities who never set foot in the community. But, the relationship of one name to another will be lacking.
After decade upon decade of New England weather, tombstones flake and fade, and eventually grow illegible. Perpetual care is forgotten and there are fewer and fewer visitors as succeeding generations join their ancestors beneath the grass. Yet, names on street signs are seen daily by scores, hundreds, even thousands of people. When they become weathered, they are easily replaced and persist through time. The names they bear are clues to stories awaiting discovery
