A cemetery without burials? It seems a contradiction. But that’s just what you’ll find in the northeastern corner of Burlington, Connecticut. A roadside obelisk about twelve feet tall is inscribed with names of three members of the Ford family, their ages, and dates of death between 1855 and 1901. None of them are interred beside the monument.
Mentioned in town records, searchable via internet, and noted on some maps, the Ford Cemetery fails to meet Webster’s definition of “an area for burial” since no one is buried there and none can take place. The three bodies once resting in this spot are said to have been removed over a century ago by family members after the site was sold to the Hartford Water Works (now the Metropolitan District) for construction of Nepaug Reservoir.
The marble memorial is stained a light bronze and freckled with lichen after years sheltered beneath trees. Set in a small glade of ferns, it’s only about ten feet off the pavement, but hard to see behind a thick cover of leafed-out shrubs. The monument has long lost its original purpose, but time may have made it even more valuable as a roadside curiosity that stirs passersby to wonder.
Carved in stone are the names of Omri Ford who died at 78 in 1888, Caroline Ford who died in 1901 at 92, and their daughter Caroline M. Ford who tragically predeceased them in 1855 at the young age of 18. Diagonally across the street was their home, an ancient saltbox painted red. Large apple trees grew out front. The windowpanes were small with wavy, bubbled glass. The family raised most of their food on their five-acre plot. Years after the Fords had left, the house burned one night in 1921, under circumstances that some found “mysterious.”
Omri Ford was not only a hard-working farmer, but a skilled mechanic. He had a shop down the road for making gun barrels. He frequently wore a cape.
Caroline Ford was a Native American, often hosting visitors from the local Tunxis Tribe. She typically had candy at the ready for visiting children. Grieving her beloved daughter, she always kept a chair and place setting at the table for the girl. The young woman’s original gravestone contained her picture, and her mother kept a meticulous flower garden around it with daffodils, crocuses, lilacs and phlox. It had a stone wall in front with a gate that matched the iron fence on the other three sides. The water company removed the fence to use at its caretaker’s house.
Although there are no buried bodies along Ford Road, ghosts of the family linger for those who know the stories. And those tales exist because the monument, a seemingly useless artifact of the past, was left to remain after its reason for being was long gone. It’s been a lightning rod of curiosity for many, including the late historian Lewis S. Mills who, in his words, liked “going out and finding a story.”
In the early 1950s, more than half a century after Caroline’s death, Mills tracked down four people who had known the Fords. He wrote a short essay for a 1954 issue of a magazine called The Lure of the Litchfield Hills. Stimulated by seeing this wayside peculiarity, his words give the Fords an afterlife among the living that would have been lost without his efforts. It enlarges and gives meaning to what is otherwise an unremarkable road of forest and homes, investing lasting interest in an ordinary place and prosaic days. Without Mills’ efforts, the site would have remained z mystery to me and many others.
Memories were stirred by Mills’ article, and about six months after it appeared, Sarah S. Holcomb of nearby Collinsville had a letter published in the magazine recalling a conversation with Mrs. Ford, who kept a loaded musket near at hand after her husband Omri’s death. "The other day I saw Omri coming up the road from the cemetery,” Mrs. Ford told her. “I took the shot gun, cocked it, went to the door, aimed it at him and told him to go back where he come from or I would shoot him. He went back, but he may come again".
Facts about the Fords are scarce, but it takes only a few details and anecdotes such as Mills uncovered to make them come vividly alive in our imaginations. Not all history is about celebrities and grand events. Simple reminders of the past, like the weathered old obelisk, can enhance experience when connected to snippets of homespun history. Keeping an eye peeled for such oddities and seeking their stories deepens even a humdrum existence. My drives on Ford Road are now haunted—by both presences and absences.
