Cemetery Tours Invite Visitors to Remember the Dead and the Past

Christina Volpe leads a tour of South End Burial Ground on October 10. AVERY MARTIN PHOTOS

Halloween season is rife with images of cemeteries as spooky or scary places. Yet in the 18th and 19th centuries, cemeteries were places of gathering, where one could remember the deceased with a picnic or just spend time in nature.

Following that tradition, the cemetery tours offered by Southington’s Barnes Museum are more educational than eerie. This fall, curator Christina Volpe partnered with town historian Phil Wooding, author Liz Kopec and others who take care of Southington’s historical burying grounds to offer tours to the public.

The trip around Oak Hill Cemetery was held on various dates this year, most recently on October 3rd. The South End Burying Ground tour on October 10th was a new addition.

“We knew the inspiration for that tour was the work we did with the Southington Outsider and others for the America 250 video on Captain Daniel Sloper and Hannah Woodruff. That was the inspiration for why we wanted to do South End. From there we said, let's walk through and list all these different people who we want to talk about, and see how much we can find out about each person,” said Volpe.

Preparing for each tour, which lasts about an hour and a half, can take months. For each cemetery, Volpe begins with a list of over 100 names, then narrows it down to a smaller list of individual graves and stories.

The lives that are covered span hundreds of years: Oak Hill, the town’s oldest cemetery, dates to 1733. South End Bury Ground has burials from as far back as 1773. Southington was founded in 1779, but existed before then as South Farmington. Combing through centuries worth of names to find relevant stories is a task that takes dedication.

“This is our first time doing a new burying ground. This tour I started in May, researching it and getting the names down. I was working with Phil Wooding and Sexton Mark and making sure that I was just getting the most accurate depiction of each person, especially the late 18th-century ones,” said Volpe.

Cemetery tours are not new. Held throughout the year in communities all over the country, they are framed as a way for visitors to make a connection to their local history. For Southington residents, the tours happen in places with familiar names.

The South End section of town is very old, settled as a commercial hub well before the Revolutionary War. Prior to the industrial revolution, farms and mills turned out dried cornmeal that was shipped to the Caribbean.

“This section of Southington, extending down South End Road, was the original Twenty Rod highway,” said Volpe. “If you've gone down by the New Mill Restaurant, Recreation Park, you see waterworks. There have always been waterworks in the area. Where there's water, there is settlement in old New England, because you could then sustain a farm or a grist mill or something like that.”

Buried at South End is Captain Daniel Sloper and his wife Hannah Woodruff. Their family names now grace YMCA Camp Sloper and Woodruff St., but both played crucial roles for the town in the Revolutionary War.

Tour at South End.

At Oak Hill Cemetery, one important stop is the grave of Peter Tusco. Tusco died in 1767 in Southington, and was, as his grave says, a “Spanish Indian.” That likely meant he was an Indigenous person from Florida or another Spanish colony.

Originally a slave of the Curtiss family, he was manumitted, which that meant he could earn his own salary but had to live and stay within a close vicinity of his former owners. Tusco was able to make a life for himself after his manumission, and bought his own gravestone. On it he wrote the words, “A free man.”

Stories like those are among the things Volpe wants visitors to take from the tours. The individuals highlighted lived lives with highs and lows, just like today, and acknowledging that can help connect people to local history.

“I hate to think that we live our lives just to be forgotten, but unfortunately, that's what will happen to all of us at some point,” said Volpe. “All these people here, for the most part, lived full, abundant, nuanced lives. If we can just talk about them for a minute, I feel like that's not in vain.”

“I also feel that if we can highlight how our community today is built on people of the past and their efforts and what they did, then we're doing justice to their service in creating Southington, while also remembering them as people, however complicated.”

Visitors at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Southington is a Hub of Food Waste Recycling, Thanks to Circular Services

The Circular Services campus at 49 DePaolo Drive. PHOTO COURTESY CIRCULAR SERVICES

Connecticut no longer has landfills. To be sure, if you drive down I-91 near New Haven or Hartford, it is hard to miss the huge landfills that loom like hills along the highway. But those operations are now closed, and no new landfills have taken their place since.

The closure of the state’s landfills was a gradual process that goes back several decades. Hartford’s ‘Mount Trash’ stopped accepting waste in 2015, while New Haven’s landfill shut down in 2004. Southington’s landfill at Old Turnpike Road closed in 1967. Contaminated by heavy metals and solvents, it was designated a Superfund site in 1984 by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and took some 34 years to be cleaned up.

Connecticut no longer buries its waste in state. So what happens to it? There are two basic answers. Some of it is burned in trash-to-energy plants. However, most of it is sent abroad to states like Pennsylvania and Ohio for burial in landfills there.

Whether done by truck or train, hauling waste a distance of several hours is expensive. In an effort to reduce the waste stream, the state passed a law in 2011 mandating that any facility that produces large quantities of food waste must recycle it. Currently the minimum threshold is 26 tons per year.

The Role of Circular Services

As happens from time to time, passage of legislation paved the way for the growth of a whole new industry. Connecticut now has several facilities that take in and process food waste. Of these, the one owned by Circular Services at 49 DePaolo Drive in Southington is the largest – in fact, it is the biggest facility of its kind in southern New England. It also has some truly astonishing technological capabilities.

During our visit to the Circular Services campus, Marketing Director Michelle Cusano introduced us to Thor. Thor, named after the Norse god, is a huge machine with god-like powers. Perhaps most remarkable is its ability to separate food from packaging quickly and at scale.

Some of the food waste that is brought to Circular Services’ campus is food scraps from hospital cafeterias and college dining halls. But much more of it takes the form of unusable food that has never been cooked or sold. That food is usually packaged. The challenge then is to remove that food from its containers and sort the food and the packaging into separate streams.

That is where Thor comes in. Essentially, the machine works by thrashing the food containers into little pieces that can then be sorted into organic and inorganic bits. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fed bags of popcorn, bottles of soda, packaged meats, or cans of soup – Thor can handle it all. You can see one of Thor's prototypes in action here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ict7VuZozqg

Once Thor has done its work, there is a pile of packaging, which can be binned and shipped to a facility that does conventional recycling.

Packaging materials to be recycled. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

As for the food waste, that gets piped to Circular Services’ giant fermentation tanks. There it is joined there by food waste that was hauled in without packaging. Trucks full of dairy and other liquid products dump their contents into a giant opening in an oversized garage called 'The Pit.'

'The Pit' at the far end of the garage.

The place where the real food-waste magic happens is in the fermentation tanks. There all the waste food streams – meat, popcorn, pineapples, soda, expired milk – gets mixed together. From that point on, anaerobic bacteria do the rest of the work, breaking down the material into more basic components.

Getting the ferment right is a challenge. Anyone familiar with composting knows that it works best when there is a mix of materials - when ‘browns’ like grass clippings are mixed with ‘greens’ like vegetable trimmings. A similar principal applies to the anaerobic fermentation process. Recently, Circular Services had to process a batch of yogurt that didn’t come out right. The batch was large enough that it required 30 tractor trailers to transport. The fermentation tanks were able to handle the yogurt, but only so much at a time. Biochemists at the plant spend a lot of time monitoring the quality of the mix.

One of the main fermentation tanks.

As you might imagine, the food waste slurry stinks – while most of the Circular Services campus is odor-free, the area right next to the tanks is a rather pungent. Most of that stink comes from methane gas. As it happens, methane can be burned and used to generate electricity. And that is one thing Circular Services does – burn the methane to power turbines that generate electricity for the local grid.

Part of the electricity-generation plant at Circular Services.

Once the fermentation process is complete, the organic residue can be used to make various products. One of these is compost. The company has bags of its compost available for sale near its entrance, and also produces the product for a number of area retailers.

The most amazing thing? The compost, which is made in large part from the residue of the fermentation tanks, is black, clean, and smells a lot like clean earth on a warm day after a rainstorm.

A handful of compost from the bags sold by Circular Services.

Making Mulch

There is one more part of Circular Services’ business model. When tree companies or builders remove trees, they need to find a place to dump their chips and tree stumps. Circular Services takes in those remains and turns them into mulch. State and local officials were on hand recently for the ribbon-cutting of the new building where this mulch is bagged.

Marketing Director Michelle Cusano gestures to the piles of woodchips.

That is production cycle for Circular Services, then: waste food and stumps come into the facility, while electricity, compost, and mulch go out.

Southington in the American Revolution

SCREENSHOT FROM 'SOUTHINGTON IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION'

Today the names 'Sloper' and 'Woodruff' are likely to make you think of roads or places in town. Yet 250 years ago, they were the names of real people who lived in what we now call Southington. As part of this year's America250 celebrations, The Southington Outsider has teamed up with Christina Volpe, curator of the Barnes Museum, to create this short film that focuses on Captain Daniel Sloper, his wife Hannah B. Woodruff, and the small but not insignificant role they played in the American Revolution. Filmed at YMCA Camp Sloper and South End Burying Ground, it offers a rare glimpse into Southington's revolutionary past.

Southington in the American Revolution - A Short Film

CLICK TO WATCH

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/abd89a_f33ecf2ad1b249758ffa85107d93f0a8/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Special thanks goes to Wayne Edwards, who is a member of our Board of Directors and a professor in the Communications, Film and Media Studies Department at the University of New Haven, for working with his students Elisa Broche and Jay Sanders to film and edit this video. Thanks also to John McDonald of CTPhotoPro for sharing the drone footage of South End Cemetery.