Roots of the Plainfield Grave Guardians
Established as a 501(c)(3) non profit organization in 2020, the Plainfield Grave Guardians fill a longstanding gap for the community’s ancient burial grounds. Three core values anchor our humanities-based educational mission: knowledge, memory, and community.
The Grave Guardians story begins with a summertime walk down Cemetery Road one balmy August. That’s where educator, researcher, and writer Jason Bowns noticed a leaning brown sign beside a set of wooden stairs stating “Old Plainfield Cemetery.” He’d never heard of this place before and ventured up those stairs and began to wander around. Mirroring James Slater’s reaction when he’d visited during his book research three decades earlier, in 1992, Bowns was spellbound by the extensive selection of hand-carved gravestones with curated symbols shining a light simultaneously upon so many lives and those times in which they lived.
Yet, why were so many stones assailed by lichen, stretched out flat on the ground or precariously leaning? Most alarming was one particular grave which had a tree growing out of it resulting in the stone flipping forward at a right angle so it faced the ground below. As a certified history teacher and educator, these circumstances inspired Bowns to reach out to social media and community leaders to understand what this public place was and why it had fallen into such disrepair despite tremendous opportunity the site presented as an education platform.
Founding the Grave Guardians
In December 2020, the Plainfield Grave Guardians formed as a result. The founding documents enumerate a core mission, “The Corporation has four key purposes which are to clean up and restore Old Plainfield Cemetery and the Town of Plainfield’s other historic cemeteries; to recruit and train community volunteers to perform cemetery cleanup and maintenance work; to provide grounds maintenance and grave marker care in Plainfield’s historic cemeteries; and to educate the community at large about those interred in Plainfield’s historic cemeteries which include many distinctive families from Connecticut history as well as veterans of the American Revolution and Civil War.” This educational focus centers around hands-on exploration of every stone which involves a discussion of the times in which a decedent lived, the funerary art on each stone and material used in addition to the preservation of the stone itself for future generations.
Gaining support from community leaders, Bowns and a newly constituted Board of Directors and elected officers set out to actualize the Grave Guardians’ mission which essentially reflects attention towards the physical space of Old Plainfield Cemetery by reversing the neglect and restoring this hallowed site to a state more closely manifesting its previous beauty. Accompanying that is the goal to enlist volunteers to support Old Plainfield Cemetery and to facilitate a long-term ongoing maintenance once a restoration is completed.
Wholly independent from these tangible elements is education’s role as a vehicle to transmit institutional memory and offer metaphysical insights about human nature and life in this present day. As Phillip Spaulding’s grave marker starkly notes with words as true in 2024 as they were in 1752, “As you are now/ So once were we/ as we Are Now/ So you Must be.” Indeed, while the mission recognizes that other cemeteries exist throughout the town of Plainfield, Old Plainfield Cemetery has, since its founding, constituted a foremost priority as past activities show.
From Landscaping to Educating
In its first year, the Grave Guardians invested most heavily in understanding this historic site’s needs, attending training events and building relationships with several organizations driven to reverse burial ground neglect. The group raised general community awareness, organized fundraising drives, recruited volunteers, coordinated training events, promoted cleanups, advocated for Old Plainfield Cemetery’s interests with municipal leaders, engaged news organizations, and continued to seek out expert guidance regarding best practices from a range of jurisdictions. These outreach efforts involved the National Park Service and those who maintain historic burial grounds in Providence, Newport, Massachusetts, and beyond.
Eventually, it was clear that more resources were needed to move Old Plainfield Cemetery forward. We decided to seek out fiscal resources with grant writing and used these funds to establish a virtual learning platform to explore the site and learn about those who chose there as a final resting place. Today, the Grave Guardians mission focuses most heavily upon education following a recognition that one history professor noted a decisive ingredient for any historic site – for people to care. If no one knows about Old Plainfield Cemetery, then there’s no reason to care at all. Pursuing that path will frame the site as the expansive learning space which it represents. The virtual learning accompanies site visits, and partnerships with local educators are in place to generate curricular modules to utilize for classroom learning activities later this year.
In its first year, the Grave Guardians invested most heavily in understanding this historic site’s needs, attending training events and building relationships with several organizations driven to reverse burial ground neglect. The group raised general community awareness, organized fundraising drives, recruited volunteers, coordinated training events, promoted cleanups, advocated for Old Plainfield Cemetery’s interests with municipal leaders, engaged news organizations, and continued to seek out expert guidance regarding best practices from a range of jurisdictions. These outreach efforts involved the National Park Service and those who maintain historic burial grounds in Providence, Newport, Massachusetts, and beyond.
Eventually, it was clear that more resources were needed to move Old Plainfield Cemetery forward. We decided to seek out fiscal resources with grant writing and used these funds to establish a virtual learning platform to explore the site and learn about those who chose there as a final resting place. Today, the Grave Guardians mission focuses most heavily upon education following a recognition that one history professor noted a decisive ingredient for any historic site – for people to care. If no one knows about Old Plainfield Cemetery, then there’s no reason to care at all. Pursuing that path will frame the site as the expansive learning space which it represents. The virtual learning accompanies site visits, and partnerships with local educators are in place to generate curricular modules to utilize for classroom learning activities later this year.
Learning at Old Plainfield Cemetery
Most recently, the Grave Guardians continue to enhance its educational mission, promoting humanities-based opportunities with the local schools and community. Last school year, Plainfield High School history students participated in a separate site visit which featured a scavenger hunt for students targeting gravestone symbolism and exploring the breadth of personalities interred at Old Plainfield Cemetery. The director of the Connecticut Gravestone Network and several members of the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter also participated as honored guest speakers. Although not listed on any State or National Register at this time, members of the community increasingly recognize this rich 2.7-acre space as a precious cultural resource offering an extensive palate of invaluable learning opportunities for today’s living generations.
The current preservation plan which reflects the long-term stewardship of the property currently consists of mowing Old Plainfield Cemetery before Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. The Plainfield Grave Guardians have coordinated with the town’s leadership to take onsite maintenance further, conducting some training and site cleanup events which entailed unearthing buried grave markers. Past activities include cleaning, resetting, and repairing stones.
Although burials happened prior to 1711, this was when town leaders formally voted to designate Old Plainfield Cemetery as the official public burial ground. The earliest identifiable stone today is the 1721 stone of Mehetable Blunt. For two hundred years, burials included freed slaves, a Hessian soldier, veterans of the American Revolution and Civil War, ending with the last recorded burial of Dwight Carlton Tracy in a family plot on the cemetery’s western side in 1925. From thirteen British colonies, the United States became 48 states within that time. In the twentieth-century, only four burials happened, and all of these were members of the Tracy family and no one else. Old Plainfield Cemetery features historically significant personalities which offer a singular lens into local history, offering immediacy and relevance wider American events on a national scale. With nearly 400 burial plots, Old Plainfield Cemetery’s stones comprise an unusually wide variety of personalities and prevailing grave marker design standards.