Then Again: The Bennington Centre Cemetery, ‘Vermont’s Sacred Acre’

Two poems are posted like sentries beside Robert Frost’s grave in Bennington: along with his famed “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is his lesser-known “In a Disused Graveyard.” The latter is particularly apt, given the location, even if the Bennington Centre Cemetery is still in active use, because the poem speaks to the relationship between the living and the dead.

It begins:

“The living come with grassy tread

To read the gravestones on the hill;

The graveyard draws the living still,

But never any more the dead.

“The verses in it say and say:

‘The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’”

The quote is appropriately somber for a cemetery whose oldest headstones bear images of winged cherubs — representing the deceased ascending to heaven — and the Latin admonishment “memento mori” (remember death) — a reminder to live a sinless life to avoid damnation.

But in addition to pondering your own mortality, you might find this cemetery is a great place  to contemplate the early years of Vermont. Bennington played an outsized role in the state’s creation. And many of the people who played parts, large and small, in those events are buried in the Bennington Centre Cemetery, or the Old First Church Cemetery as it is sometimes called. The graveyard is also known by a third name, Vermont’s Sacred Acre, which is what the Vermont Legislature designated it in the 1930s.

Bennington began as lines on a map drawn in 1749 by New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth. The land was in the northern edge of hunting lands claimed by the Mohicans, after they were pushed out of what would become the colony of New York and into Massachusetts and Connecticut by the Mohawks in the mid-1600s. It wasn’t until June 1761, as fighting in the French and Indian War was dying down, that Europeans settled in Bennington.

An initial group of 22 English colonists sought to create a community of New Light Congregationalists, which they intended to be more pious and less secular than most communities in New England. The settlers made their way on horseback from western Massachusetts, along a crude trail cut through the woods by surveyors. As they neared the town’s border, the women in the group raced to see who among them would be the first one to arrive at their new home. Bridget Harwood took the honors.

A year later, she became the first to depart. While helping with the harvest one fall day, the widowed mother of nine suffered a fatal stroke and was buried in the midst of the hilltop village that was taking shape. The original settlement of Bennington, now called Old Bennington, would grow up around her as more people arrived and built homes. The year after her death, the tiny community erected a meeting house a short distance from her grave.

Soon other settlers would join Harwood in finding a permanent resting place on that hill. In the 262 years since she was buried, some 2,600 people have been interred in the earth around her. They include her former neighbors and many others who were drawn to Bennington in the decades after her demise to start businesses, farms and families.

The people best remembered today were involved in a series of conflicts. The first clash was over who held legitimate land titles. Bennington residents got theirs from New Hampshire, so didn’t take kindly to people who claimed that the colony of New York controlled this land. Later, during the American Revolution, the struggle was with the British. The closest flashpoint was in nearby Hoosick, New York, where the Battle of Bennington was fought. (The British had been trying to reach Bennington to steal horses and other supplies stored there, hence the battle’s name.) After the Revolution, Bennington residents resumed their fight with New Yorkers, who managed to block Vermont’s admission to the Union until 1791.

Visiting the cemetery in Old Bennington is taking a stroll among people you would encounter in a Vermont history book. Here lies Stephen Fay, owner of the famed Catamount Tavern, which was located just up the road from the cemetery. The tavern was the gathering place for opponents of Yorker and British control of the region. Stories related to the tavern abound. A New York sympathizer was kidnapped, put on trial at the tavern and sentenced to suffer the public humiliation of being tied to a chair and left hanging from the tavern’s tall signpost for hours.

During the Revolution, a British sympathizer, David Redding, was convicted at a hasty trial held in the tavern and publicly hanged on the town green near the burying ground. Redding’s body was claimed by Stephen’s son Jonas, a doctor, who preserved the skeleton. It later became the property of a Williamstown, Massachusetts, doctor, who used it for medical instruction. After the doctor’s death, the skeleton was stored in the family’s attic and eventually donated to the Bennington Museum, where it remained in a drawer for about a half century before being interred in the Old First Church Cemetery in 1981.

Here too lie nearly three dozen members of the Fay family. Among them are five of Stephen Fay’s seven sons, who each played roles in the new territory, including as delegate to Vermont’s constitutional convention, drafter of Vermont’s declaration of independence, Bennington County sheriff, U.S. attorney for Vermont and Vermont Supreme Court justice. Stephen’s eldest son, John, fought beside four of his brothers at the Battle of Bennington, and was killed there. His body was returned to Bennington for burial.

John Fay’s widow, Mary, suffered another loss eight days after her husband’s death, when her four-year-old son Hiram died. Hiram had been the youngest of Mary and John’s seven children. A week later, Mary herself died. According to a family bible, the cause was grief. She was 39 years old.

As if this wasn’t enough heartbreak for one family, the youngest surviving child, five-year-old Joseph, died barely two weeks after his mother. The two boys died close enough to each other that they share a double headstone, which stands next to those of their parents. It reads in part: “Cropped off in early Life our Joys are fled / And lie entombed among the silent dead / Sleep on sweet babes your work on earth is done / And you are gone to seek an heavenly Home.”

Death still wasn’t done with the Fay family. Just two days after Joseph’s death, their third eldest child, 15-year-old son Caleb, also died. Caleb had been living in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and was buried there. His gravestone offers no hint of the cause of his death.

Near the Fay plots, a simple stone slab, standing slightly taller than the surrounding grave markers, honors the life of Samuel Robinson, leader of Bennington’s original settlement. Roughly 140 Robinsons are buried in the graveyard, but Samuel is not one of them. The memorial to Robinson is what is known as a cenotaph, a monument with no body accompanying it. Samuel was buried in England, where he died of smallpox in 1767 while on a mission to plead the case of settlers like himself and of nonresident speculators, who obtained their properties through the Colony of New Hampshire, against claims made by New York officials.

Samuel was the progenitor of a long line of Robinsons who served as public officials and in other positions of authority whose graves you can also find in Old Bennington. His son, Samuel Jr., led a militia company at the Battle of Bennington and also served as a judge, presiding over Redding’s trial at the Catamount Tavern.

Moses Robinson, another of Samuel’s sons, was Bennington’s town clerk for almost two decades, starting in 1762; served as a colonel in the Vermont militia; and was a member of the governor’s council, chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, Vermont’s second governor, a U.S. senator from Vermont, and capped off his career by serving a term in the Vermont House of Representatives. Moses’ son, Nathan, succeeded him in the Vermont House. Nathan’s son, John, also served in the Vermont House, as well as in the Vermont Senate, before becoming the state’s 22nd governor in 1853. All are buried here.

Buried nearby is Isaac Tichenor, an extremely influential figure in early Vermont. Born in New Jersey, Tichenor came to Bennington in August 1777 to serve in the Continental Army and remained there for the rest of his life. He represented the town in the Vermont House, including a term as speaker, and pleaded Vermont’s case before Congress for admission to the Union. He was a judge on the Vermont Supreme Court and eventually became chief justice. He resigned that position to serve as U.S. senator from Vermont, and later resigned that position when he was elected as the fourth governor of Vermont, serving a total of 11 years in that office.

Anthony Haswell, also buried here, held sway in Vermont through the power of the word. A printer by trade, Haswell responded to pleas from Vermont officials that he move from Massachusetts to Bennington to set up shop. There he published the Vermont Gazette newspaper and was periodically the official printer of state documents. Haswell was a controversial figure, drawing sharp criticism from devout Christians for publishing Ethan Allen’s deist tract “Reason; The Only Oracle of Man.”

But it was Haswell’s support of Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon that got him into serious trouble. After Lyon was jailed for violating the Sedition Act, which criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious” criticism of the federal government, Haswell came to his defense, publishing an ad for a lottery designed to pay off Lyon’s fines. Haswell also republished allegations of wrongdoing by President John Adams’ administration. As a longtime supporter of Adams’ political rival, Thomas Jefferson, Haswell was targeted for prosecution and jailed for two months under the Sedition Act.

Mary Tilden Dewey, whose grave is near the entrance to the cemetery, is remembered for the help she provided American troops at the Battle of Bennington. While soldiers slept on her floor, she baked 80 loaves of bread that her husband, Eldad, took to the troops.

Eldad left his pregnant wife a horse, so if necessary she could escape with their one-year-old son. But when a surgeon who was rushing to the battlefield to treat the wounded needed a horse, Mary gave him hers. She said that if British troops approached, she could boil up some hasty pudding to throw in their faces.

After the battle, hundreds of prisoners as well as many of the dead and wounded were brought to Bennington. Those who died of their wounds while in Bennington were buried in the cemetery in a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 29 men — 16 German soldiers who had been contracted by their princely rulers to fight beside the British, as well as 13 Americans.

The cemetery in which those soldiers were buried stood beside the town’s meetinghouse. But that structure was meant to be temporary and is long gone, replaced by the First Congregational Church, now known as the Old First Church. The Federal-style gem (designed by Lavius Fillmore, who also created the iconic Congregational Church of Middlebury) wasn’t built until 1805. Visitors today can be forgiven if they don’t realize that the cemetery that nestles so comfortably next to it predates the church by more than 40 years.

In a 1932 sermon, the Rev. Dr. Vincent Ravi Booth of the First Congregational Church of Bennington referred to the cemetery as “Vermont’s Sacred Acre.” (This was several years before the state Legislature designated it as such.) To Booth, “(a)ll lovers of the heroic” who understood the sacrifices of the founding generation would recognize this as “holy ground.” Booth employed the language of the sacred to call for the restoration of both the cemetery and of the church, which had fallen into disrepair. Today, the church is again in need of restoration. Unlike the disused graveyard in Frost’s poem, this one remains active, continuing to serve as the final resting place for people who have played their own roles in Vermont’s ongoing story.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: The Bennington Centre Cemetery, ‘Vermont’s Sacred Acre’ .