THE HEADSTONE BRIGADE

In rescuing Vermont’s rural cemeteries from the ravages of time, these volunteers become “challengers of oblivion.”

BY LEATH TONINO | PHOTOS BY BILL MCDOWELL

A member of the Vermont Old Cemetery Association for more than two decades, Barry Trutor rests a work-gloved hand on a 19th-century tombstone in West Haven, Vermont, population 285.

Early On A Drizzly Gray

Saturday at the close of summer, a cemetery I had driven past countless times over the years and noticed only peripherally became something else entirely, something vivid and intriguing. As I strolled its slick grass, it wasn’t just the dead who greeted me, inviting me in and sparking my curiosity. Among the Lussiers and Gauthiers and Gravells and Graces and Harveys and Milos and Goulets and Renauds and Beauchamps and Borias—in addition to Patrick Butler (d. 1860, 15 months old) and the sister Nellie he never met (d. 1876, nine months old)—a dozen flesh-and-blood volunteers were busy among the headstones, commencing a long morning’s labor.

One guy shoveled sure-pack gravel mix into his wheelbarrow. A second guy, carrying a heavy rock bar, said to a third guy, carrying a carpenter’s level, “What’ve we got for straps? We’re in big trouble without straps.” John Deere was present, as was a Bobcat track loader loaned by a local landscaper. There were wisecracks about hernias; chitchat about clay soil and poor drainage and frost heaves toppling 700-pound angels; laments about families that moved west, vanished a century ago, left nobody behind to yank weeds and plant plastic flowers. The volunteers ranged in age from teen to septuagenarian, in occupation from farm wife to real estate developer, in footwear from flimsy sandals to beefy hiking boots. Two were cousins. A couple were church ladies. The majority were strangers.

OK, but here’s the image that really did it. Kneeling beside a listing mini obelisk, a young woman was scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing at a grimy, lichen-splotched epitaph with what appeared to be a standard-issue toothbrush, pausing occasionally to fire a spray bottle filled with the biological solution D/2 (the same product that keeps Arlington National Cemetery spiffy). She had no family ties to the person buried below her, yet nevertheless she held her awkward, hunched position—a position that, to my eye, resembled a kind of bow, a kind of earnest, elbow-grease prayer. She was seemingly oblivious to the increasing precipitation, sheltered by her own private umbrella of quiet focus. She was smiling.

Headstone righting, repair, and cleaning. St. Peter’s Cemetery. Vergennes, Vermont. 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. That was the posting on the Vermont Old Cemetery Association website that had caught my attention and led me to this niche community. Since VOCA was established in 1958, history buffs and genealogy freaks and dutiful descendants and nature lovers and plenty of helpful civic-minded folk have crisscrossed the Green Mountains, their truck beds heaped with tubes of two-part epoxy and pruning shears, in order to (as Article II of the outfit’s official constitution puts it) “encourage the restoration and preservation of neglected and abandoned cemeteries in the State of Vermont.”

Encouragement takes primarily the form of hands-on assistance, though it also manifests as shared technical expertise (how does one reassemble a time-shattered slate grave marker?) and cash grants ($330 for five large stones repaired in Glover’s Westlook Cemetery, $750 for tree removal and trimming in Granville’s South Hollow Cemetery). According to VOCA’s autumn calendar, members would tackle Pawlet, Rutland, and Shaftsbury, then round out the year with a biannual meeting that doubles as a chicken-and-biscuits luncheon. But first, five miles down the road from my home in Ferrisburgh, St. Peter’s was scheduled to receive some TLC. For reasons I couldn’t name, I wanted to attend.

CLOCKWISE FROM BELOW: Jamey Greenough, a volunteer from New York state, gets busy scrubbing in West Haven’s tiny Humiston Cemetery, named for the family interred there (in the background is West Haven town cemetery commissioner Harold Book); a trailer filled with tools for bringing overgrown cemeteries back to life; Caitlin Abrams, a Vermonter whose headstonerestoration videos have been a surprising hit on TikTok.

Maybe it had to do with a yellowy newspaper clipping I’d recently stumbled on, a 1973 interview with VOCA’s founder that anticipated, in a way, the toothbrush woman’s smile. A professor of English at UVM and an author passionately engaged with folklore, Leon Dean, born in Bristol, Vermont, in 1889, told the reporter, “I’ve done quite a number of things in my life, but this has given me just about the most satisfaction of anything.” He was referring to “saving” cemeteries that had suffered the “atrocity” of neglect, a pastime that doesn’t jibe with the usual self-interested, utilitarian calculus of modern America. Lavish your energy on the off-plumb, the overgrown, the forgotten? Kneel in the rain when you could be staying dry or taking care of your own land? Clouds scudding low, the weather coming and going and coming, I wandered with my hood up, asking everyone why they were here.

Jeanne Jackson, pink blouse, black rubber galoshes, woke at 5 a.m. to make sandwiches for the group: “This cemetery was in horrible shape, not mowed, water pooling on my parents’ grave. Today’s our third session in five years, and it looks 100 percent better than before, but each spring there are more stones that need to be treated. It’s not cheap to hire a contractor to bring in a machine and right a stone. VOCA saved us tens of thousands of dollars by showing us how to do the fixes ourselves, and now I volunteer at cemeteries around the county out of gratitude.”

Jeff Bostwick, sunburned and muddy, his fifth VOCA outing of the year: “My first time was in Milton, graves dating to the late 1700s, the Revolutionary War era. That was a powerful experience. I’m a seventh-generation Vermonter and consider all these people my family. It’s tangible, honoring them. You can see your progress. And by evening, I’m exhausted, barely able to get off the couch. Seriously, I wish I’d discovered this 20 years ago.”

David Austin, floppy-brimmed hat, serves on the Vergennes City Council, lives across the street from his childhood house and routinely walks through St. Peter’s at night: “Do you know James Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere, about suburbia and sprawl? You can’t wave a magic wand and create a sense of place. I’ve travelled a lot overseas and there’s always somebody doing this type of maintenance, even at the tiniest cemetery. It has to do with integrity of place, demonstrating that this is a specific place, not a generic place, and it’s worth valuing. I guess it’s my turn?”

After an hour of talking and feeling rather ashamed of a sweatless brow and dirtless fingernails, I decided it was my turn. Austin, Bostwick, and three others were preparing to lift a headstone with the Bobcat and reset it on the granite base (previously tilted, freshly leveled) from which it had fallen. The stone was a behemoth, and without the precious tow straps, the job would have been big trouble indeed. Fifteen minutes of tinkering and strategizing delivered us to the moment of don’t-botch-it teamwork, a blue-collar ballet. The Bobcat operator gingerly elevated his forks. Four of us circled the dangling, swaying stone and guided it toward the base with 40 sensitive fingertips. A voice said, “Gentle, gentle.” A voice said, “Left, left, left a titch.” A voice said, “Eeeeasy.” And then—an inch from landing, half an inch, less—the stone was freestanding, anchored by gravity, secure.

At that precise instant of contact, Whoa! The overcast sky broke, the sun emerged, and an electric tingle raced the length of my spine. I had been thinking in terms of a fun engineering problem, like dragging a Prius from a winter ditch, and the sudden notion that we had hoisted the deceased back up into the light was an unexpected shock.

Did we hoist the deceased, via a granite proxy, up into the light? Is that what happened? Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps I’d merely pinched a nerve in my lumbar. I recalled a favorite quote from the novelist Vladimir Nabokov: “Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I EMAILED BARRY TRUTOR, A VOCA VETERAN in the process of “rescuing” five derelict cemeteries on a 3,800-acre Nature Conservancy preserve in a particularly

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Xi “Jesse” Chen in a selfie he took on Mount Madison on June 18, 2022, the first day of his planned Presidential Traverse hike in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. That same evening, the elite Mountain Rescue Service would head out into the teeth of a wintery squall to find Chen; a photo from their mission (OPPOSITE, BELOW) shows them carrying Chen on a stretcher near the summit of Mount Washington.