RUTLAND — As this city’s sole cemetery commissioner and head of the Vermont Old Cemetery Association, Thomas Giffin can tell you all about the long life of the 163-year-old Evergreen Cemetery.
“Every stone has a story,” he said in a recent interview. “You have governors, you have U.S. senators, you have Medal of Honor winners. … You have so much of the history of the state here.”
Then this March, Giffin scanned the local paper and stumbled over what he feared was the burial ground’s obituary.
“It is with great sadness that the board of trustees of Evergreen Cemetery must announce we are ceasing operations,” its president, Paula McCann, wrote in a letter to the editor.
Since its founding in 1861, the 75-acre privately owned property has survived everything from the Civil War to Covid-19. But with a fall in traditional funerals and a rise in cremation, it has faced growing financial problems.
“The reality is that the number of people choosing to be buried is much lower now,” McCann wrote in her letter, “and the expenses are much higher.”
And so officials announced plans to archive more than 15,000 burial records and end operations, leaving no one responsible for mowing and maintenance and shutting down the possibility of people arranging for new graves.
Can a cemetery die? Locals wondered as the board voted to dissolve. Then this month, 65 plot-holders gathered at the gates and, resuscitating the old bylaws, voted in a new slate of trustees.
“It may take some time, but we have high hopes,” Giffin said of the resurrection effort, which he sees as a wake-up call for the state’s more than 2,000 other cemeteries that date back as far as the 1700s. “I see a lot of communities really agonizing over maintaining them — although I’ve never seen one this big have this issue.”
When the original 45 acres of wooded knolls opened as the Pine Hill Cemetery in 1861, “a visit to them cannot fail to gratify,” the Rutland Herald reported. Changing its name to Evergreen the next year, the burial ground accumulated more property and more plot-holders over time.
The most currently recognized name chiseled in stone is that of the late Vermont governor, U.S. representative and U.S. senator Robert Stafford. Best known for the federal student loan program that bears his name, he lived in Rutland County from his birth in 1913 to his death in 2006.
Stafford is buried alongside fellow U.S. Sen. Solomon Foot (1802-1866); U.S. representatives George Tisdale Hodges (1789-1860) and Charles Herbert Joyce (1830-1916); and governors Percival Clement (1846–1927), John Mead (1841-1920), John Page (1814-1891), Charles Manley Smith (1868-1937) and Charles Williams (1782–1853).
Military heroes range from Col. William Nichols (1829-1882), who led the 14th Vermont Volunteer Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg, to Maj. Gen. Leonard Wing (1893-1945), one of just three National Guard officers to lead a combat division in World War II.
“The people who don’t have the big monuments, they have quite a story, too,” Giffin said.
Take poet Julia Dorr (1825-1913), a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Her work included “The Fallow Field.”
Naught am I but a fallow field;
Never a crop my acres yield. …
A century after the poem’s publication, McCann discovered Evergreen Cemetery when she moved into a nearby house and, walking the grounds, unearthed the stone for Foot, who served as the U.S. Senate’s president pro tempore during the Civil War.
“His gravesite was completely grown over,” she recalled.
Since joining the cemetery’s board of trustees, McCann has spoken publicly for years about the challenges of paying an annual minimum of $120,000 for staffing and supplies to dig graves, mow and respond to genealogy requests.
“We can no longer be self-sustaining,” she told the Rutland City board of aldermen at a 2022 meeting. “Cemeteries throughout Vermont are seeing very hard times financially. It’s not just us. We just happen to be one of the biggest and we’ve lasted as one of the longest.”
The cemetery’s bank balance dipped to $8,000 a year ago, leading its board to vote this March to dissolve due to “financial insufficiency.”
Under state law, cemetery associations that fold “may” transfer land and other assets to their home municipalities — but host communities aren’t required to receive them. That’s why Rutland City declined to take over Evergreen.
“For the city to run it would be very outside the scope of what we do every day, and would definitely cost some money,” Rutland City Mayor Mike Doenges told the Herald earlier this spring.
Instead, Doenges watched at the gates as plot holders gathered May 13 to form a new board, which is expected to meet regularly to discuss how to raise money and maintain the property.
This Memorial Day, visitors won’t hear talk of past problems, just birdsong and buzzing bees.
“Evergreen is a beautiful space,” McCann said.
Giffin, for his part, is one of the new trustees. He’s interested in helping not only as a local and state expert, but also as someone whose family has plots there.
“Men, women, children — the people who made our history are buried in these cemeteries,” he said. “We owe them something.”
