Volunteers Tackle Cemetery Clean-up (Burying Hill, 1988)

by Ellen McGrath, Staff Writer
Greenwich Time, Greenwich, Connecticut USA
Sunday, July 10, 1988, Page A4

Yesterday was the first time that Jeffrey Mead attended a picnic in a cemetery. 

The revelation was surprising, since Mead, a the 13th-generation Greenwich resident and the chairman of the Greenwich Historical Society’s Burial Grounds Committee, has spent much of the past two years in the town's oldest graveyards, cataloging headstones and foot stones, drawing maps and clearing brush.

But picnicking, no. 

The mood at the Burying Hill Cemetery at the corner of Burying Hill and Topping Roads in Round Hill, was anything but solemn early yesterday afternoon as Mead and seven volunteers affiliated with Boy Scout Troop 25 munched on hamburgers and hotdogs and swigged iced tea while they cleared out weeds and vines and picked up trash. 

The cemetery, one of the towns oldest, contains about 100 or so grades from about 1766 to 1827, Mead said. Members of the Knapp, Brown and Rundle families are buried there, he said. 

The cleanup project was suggested by Alvaro Garavito II of Riverside, who is working toward his Eagle Scout project. Garavito, 17, brought his mother, Maria Roman, his 10-year-old cousin, Alex Roman, and a couple of friends to help him earn his rank. 

Mead has done similar graveyard restoration projects in many of the town’s estimated 62 cemeteries, but he said yesterday's group should get an award for speed. Garavito had estimated it would take six hours to do the half-acre lot, but the crew was packing up after slightly less than four hours work. "I've never seen anyone work so fast,” Mead said. 

Garavito said he was required to submit a plan for cleaning the cemetery, including what tools he would need, the number of workers he would use, and how long it would take, to his scoutmaster, and have Mead act as his on-site supervisor. He also will make a map of the cemetery, cataloging the gravestones as part of his Eagle Scout project. His deadline for completing the work is July 19, he said.

"It was a lot of work,” said Garavito, and his friend Trey Kiernan, 16, carried a charcoal grill to his car. He said a friend who works for a local landscaping service lent weed trimmers and other garden tools. 

Garavito said he was tired, not only from the labor of clearing the cemetery but also from staying up until 3 a.m. yesterday to finish a wooden sign that the claims the lot as the Burying Hill Cemetery. 

Garavito used  an engraving drillbit for the lettering, then painted the grooves with his mother's red nail polish to make them stand out. His mother also bought silk flowers -she said they’ll last much longer than real ones- and planted them at the base of some of the larger field stone and marble markers. 

"It's because I'm from South America,” explained Maria Roman, a native of Columbia. “For us a cemetery without flowers is nothing.” 

Garavito said there wasn't much man-made trash, such as soda cans, in the graveyard, but someone had dumped and enormous pile of leaves in a corner. 

Mead said he hoped the Burying Hill cemetery cleanup would inspire a "Friends of Burying Hill" association to preserve the graveyard, and that the tradition would spread to the other cemeteries. 

“They’re an artifact of our history,” he said.