Cemetery Tours Invite Visitors to Remember the Dead and the Past
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.
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.”
