Memorial Day is almost here. Now celebrated on the last Monday in May, the holiday was established in 1868 as Decoration Day and celebrated on May 30th until 1971. I happened to be born on May 30, and as a child, my birthday was spent doing the DRT (the dead relative tour), as my friend Kim calls it.
Our family tour began at St. Joseph’s, the Catholic cemetery in Plymouth bounded by Summer Street and Westerly Road. Then we made our way to St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Kingston. I have vivid memories of geraniums and gladiolas in oversized white baskets placed on graves of relatives who died years before I was born. Both cemeteries featured orderly rows of gravestones and plots laid out in a grid. Only after the DRT was complete would my birthday be recognized and I was rewarded for my good behavior with cake.
My childhood recollection of cemeteries included acres of granite monuments set in a grid-like pattern in expansive fields of lawn. That notion changed for me as I entered adulthood. When my paternal grandfather died in 1980, my grandmother chose to have him buried in Vine Hills Cemetery, the public graveyard accessed from Samoset Street, and just east of St. Joseph’s cemetery.
For my entire youth, whenever we drove by Vine Hills, I thought it was a beautiful park owned by the wealthy. It did, after all, have imposing gates at the entrance and was surrounded by a fence. But entering Vine Hills at age 18 to bury my grandfather introduced me to a cemetery unlike anything I had been accustomed to. The roads meandered and the grounds were heavily planted. Graves were placed in the natural grades versus flat plains of the cemeteries where my other relatives had been buried. What I discovered in Vine Hills – like its attached southern neighbor, Oak Grove Cemetery – was a historic change in cemetery planning that swept the United States in the mid 1800s.
The new wave of cemetery planning began in 1831 when Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge was conceived by a group of horticulturists. Based on designs emerging in Europe, the cemetery featured winding roads, heavily landscaped grounds, and natural topography. Their ideas for a modern cemetery, or rural cemetery as it was called, not only solved the problem of where to bury the dead as church graveyards reached capacity, it also became America’s first public pastoral park open to all. In the case of Plymouth, Oak Grove and Vine Hills began their lives as private burial grounds, but they would eventually become Plymouth’s premier pastoral burial grounds.
The first graves were dug at Vine Hills as early as 1800, while the earliest burials at Oak Grove took place in 1803. They were most likely small family graveyards for the folks that owned the property. Hard as it is to believe today, both burial grounds were considered a great distance out of town. Plymouth at the time had a population of 5,000 and residential and business growth was focused on downtown.
Originally, burials only took place on a small portion of the land; both cemeteries were primarily used as wood lots (harvested for firewood) and were broken up into numerous separate parcels. Oak Grove became a private cemetery in 1841 when a group of investors bought the property from Andrew Russell and set out to create Plymouth’s first rural cemetery. The cemetery remained private until 1892, when it joined its neighbor Vine Hills, which the town had acquired and had been running it as a cemetery since 1869. Both followed the tenets of a rural cemetery and include winding cart paths named for flowers and trees, extensive landscaping, and topography left in its natural state. The contrast with neighboring St. Joseph’s couldn’t be greater. To this day the layouts are strikingly different when viewed in aerial photographs, such as on Google Earth.
It wasn’t until 2015, on a walking tour conducted by Pilgrim Hall Museum director Donna Curtin, that I was fully exposed to the beauty, history, and landscape of the cemeteries, which are now one contiguous unit. Donna’s tour began at the late 19th century receiving tomb. Constructed of solid granite blocks, the building’s original purpose was to store caskets when the ground was too frozen to allow burials. As we made our way through the landscape, Donna pointed out significant tombs, sarcophagi, and obelisks of prominent Plymouth citizens.
Among the people buried there: Bourne Spooner (founder of the Plymouth Cordage Company), William and Mary Ellen Russell (benefactors of the former Russell Library on North Street), members of the Hedge family (of Hedge House fame and Hedge brick works), Samuel Doten (a major in the Plymouth regiment in the Civil War), William T. Davis (leading Plymouth lawyer and famed historian); JE Chandler (noted Plymouth architect, and A.S. Burbank (famous for Plymouth’s first souvenir store and responsible for many familiar postcard views of Plymouth).
We also witnessed specimen plantings, zinc monuments, and marble carved angels. Our tour ended at the center of the cemetery at the Memorial to the Unknown Dead. It sits in a large grass field and is bounded on two sides by the graves of Civil War veterans known as the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) lot.
These Civil War graves, as well as others, were documented by the WPA in the 1930s. Town Archivist Conor Anderson shared one of the beautiful hand drawn maps of the graves.
Not far from the memorial is the grave of James B. Chandler, a Civil War veteran and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. The cemetery also contains memorials to fallen police officers, firefighters, civil servants, and Vietnam veterans. And there is a memorial and grave dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. It contains ashes from Jewish victims murdered and burned in pits in the woods of Kamianka, Ukraine.
For all the sad memories these grounds carry, they are indeed beautiful. I found myself spending way too much time wandering the grounds when I was taking photographs for this column.
With any luck, we will have a beautiful Memorial Day weekend (but as someone who has lived through many a Plymouth Memorial Day weekend, I can say the odds are against us). Even if you don’t participate in a DRT, I would suggest spending some time walking the grounds of Vine Hills and Oak Grove this weekend. The dogwoods and azaleas are ablaze with color, and rhododendrons are just beginning to pop. It’s the best time of year to witness this gem in the heart of the downtown area.
Architect Bill Fornaciari is a lifelong resident of Plymouth (except for a three-year adventure going West as a young man) and the owner of BF Architects in Plymouth. His firm specializes in residential work and historic preservation. Have a question or idea for this column? Email Bill at billfornaciari@gmail.com.