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

Danville High School senior, Brett Elliott, is pictured in the Little Drew cemetery in the Tampico area of North Danville. He is kneeling above what may be the oldest gravestone in Danville.
Danville High School senior, Brett Elliott, is pic­tured in the Lit­tle Drew ceme­tery in the Tampi­co area of North Danville. He is kneel­ing above what may be the old­est grave­stone in Danville.

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.

According to the hand-carved stone, Samuel Stevens was buried there in 1795.
Accord­ing to the hand-carved stone, Samuel Stevens was buried there in 1795.

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;”> Share