Roadside Grave

Imagine having a gravestone planted in front of your home just a few yards from the door, and so close to the road that it’s easily seen by passersby. That’s exactly what you’ll find along the curved walkway to an eighteenth-century house on Merryall Road in New Milford, Connecticut. Is it historically intriguing, a responsibility to care for, or creepy? Maybe it’s all of that and more. At the very least, it must tie the record for the world’s smallest cemetery, if you can use that term for a single grave.

Situated at the base of a mature tree, it’s a simple stone with an arched top, stained and darkened by more than two centuries of New England weather. “Ruby, wife of Grishom W. French, died May 14, 1812,” reads the inscription. It set my curiosity afire.

Home burials, I knew, were not uncommon two hundred years ago, but were usually behind a house or at the edge of what was once a cultivated field. Typically, the plot had several family members and was often surrounded by a stone wall. Why was Ruby alone and so close to the road? Who was Ruby French and of what did she die? Could it have been a disease like smallpox that required a quick interment? Was there an actual body buried on the spot, or was it just a memorial monument?

The mystery only deepened after a call to New Milford town historian Joanne Chapin. No one had ever posed the question before, and the historical society didn’t have any leads. Chapin looked into some old records and found that Ruby had had two daughters, one of whom died in 1816 at age 17. In 1830, Grishom was living in Kent, according to the census. No evidence turned up that he ever owned the property where his wife was buried.

Merryall Road is narrow and winding. The area is thick with trees and residential in character, with well-spaced houses. Likely few people notice Ruby’s headstone, and of those who do, many probably mistake it for a boundary marker.

Property owner George Folchi “discovered the marker, which had been obscured by brush and debris, after he bought the house in 1996,” according to a 2010 New York Times article about the impact of family graveyards on residential property sales. He cleaned up the spot and has kept it well tended, like the rest of his yard. Folchi found no reference to Ruby in the deeds to his house. “It kind of goes with the property,” he told the Times. “There’s only one way to find out if there’s really a body buried down there, and I’m not about to do that.”

The story of Ruby French remains an enigma lost to time, at least until some future intrepid researcher makes some as yet unfathomable discovery. You’d think the past would be readily ascertainable, but it’s often easier to predict the future. In a world of expanding and increasingly complex knowledge where there are ever fewer mysteries, perhaps it does us some good to find a simple object in an ordinary place that teases us with an improbable riddle about a real person. Sometimes questions are more satisfying than answers. You never know where they lead.