Speaker for Society Annual Meeting will be DHS senior, Brett Elliott–March 30 1:00 (open to public) Membership meeting follows at 3:00

By Sharon Lakey, Danville His­tor­i­cal Society

Senior Brett Elliott was out of luck when work­ing out his final year’s sched­ule at Danville High School—no more his­to­ry cours­es were offered at his lev­el. So he and his­to­ry teacher, Jere­my White, worked out an inde­pen­dent study oppor­tu­ni­ty. Being a hands-on, out­side-kind-of-guy, Brett decid­ed to focus on Danville’s town ceme­ter­ies. There are 11 of these scat­tered through­out the town, and are under the juris­dic­tion of the Select Board. The largest in Danville, Danville Green, has its own gov­ern­ing organization.

Though ceme­ter­ies may seem like a strange thing for a young man to study, Brett explained it this way: “These ceme­ter­ies are one of the only ways to phys­i­cal­ly con­nect with the past; they’re in places that used to be unique set­tle­ments in the Town. My favorites are the lit­tle, out-of-the-way ones. They are peace­ful places, not creepy at all.”

He would go ceme­tery vis­it­ing dur­ing the class peri­od to which he was assigned. To find the ceme­ter­ies, he used infor­ma­tion on the web where he found a list­ing of and direc­tions to all the ceme­ter­ies in Danville. On one such out­ing, while vis­it­ing the Lit­tle Drew ceme­tery in the Tampi­co area of North Danville, he made an excit­ing dis­cov­ery. The web­site report­ed that no stones had been inscribed in the ceme­tery, as it is very rus­tic. But dur­ing his vis­it, Brett noticed one of the bur­ial stones looked odd; there were inden­tions on the face of it that looked intentional.

And, sure enough, after he cleaned it off, he could read a hand-carved inscrip­tion: “Samuel Stevens was born in 1723 and died in 1795.” Think­ing he had found some­thing impor­tant, he went to the Town Clerk’s office to look up death records. There were none for a Samuel Stevens, but he did appear on the 1790 cen­sus records: a house­hold of four—three males over 16 and 1 female.

“Why wasn’t there any death record?” he asked himself.

Accord­ing to Phil Somers, an avid local ceme­tery expert, there is an answer to his ques­tion. “To file a death record would cost mon­ey. The Stevens’ didn’t need to pay it, because the record was ‘writ­ten in stone.’”

On Jan­u­ary 9, Brett gave a pre­sen­ta­tion of his find­ings to the stu­dent body at Danville High School. It was so well received and inter­est­ing, we have asked him to be the speak­er at our annu­al meet­ing on March 30.

Note: Googling “rootsweb Danville VT” will get one to the site that Brett used to locate ceme­ter­ies, as well as a wealth of oth­er his­tor­i­cal Danville data. Most of this infor­ma­tion was gath­ered and shared by volunteers.

 

DHS senior, Brett Elliott–March 30 1:00 (open to pub­lic) Mem­ber­ship meet­ing fol­lows at 3:00″ rel=“nofollow” onclick=” return false;” style=“text-decoration:none; color:#000000; font-size:11px; line-height:20px;”>