Dick Cooper - November 2011

Volunteers Restore Easton's Spring Hill Cemetery

by

Dick Cooper

As she walks through Easton’s historic Spring Hill Cemetery, Fran Duncan reaches down to pick up a cast-off plastic cup. She can’t help herself. Cleaning up this sacred ground in the heart of town has become second nature. The grass is cut, the weeds are trimmed and there is ongoing work to repair vandalized markers.
But it has not always been that way. Just four years ago, the 22-acre cemetery had literally gone to seed. Weeds were high, fences had been pulled down and over time, vandals had knocked over hundreds of headstones.
“When I buried my father here in 2007, it was a mess,” she says. “Grass was up to my knees. My granddaughter said I should do something. I thought, what can I do? So I put a business plan together and went to the fraternal organizations to raise money. We got a committee together to help, and here we are.”
One of the first things the new group of volunteers, the Friends of Spring Hill Cemetery, did was replace or repair the fence around the perimeter of the cemetery to increase security. At least 250 of the historic headstones were knocked over, many of them breaking, some beyond repair.
“People were cutting through the cemetery leaving trash behind. We found bicycles and shopping carts,” says Duncan, the wife of Talbot County Councilman Tom Duncan. Now the gates are closed and locked every night.
With the $50,000 the volunteer committee has raised so far, Spring Hill Cemetery has emerged from an overgrown and almost forgotten part of the town’s past, to become a centerpiece of history. The Friends of Spring Hill Cemetery have repaired the brick office and nearby maintenance building, erected new signs at the entrances, removed dead trees and installed flag poles.
They enlisted the American Legion to repair the Civil War cannon that pays tribute to the dead of the North and South who are buried there.
“The cannon was in terrible shape when we started the cleanup,” she said. “The American Legion volunteered to fix it up.”
Headstones throughout the cemetery mark the graves of veterans from all wars since the Revolution. Many of these headstones have been fixed with the aid of master masons like R. Drake Witte.
“Here is Solomon Barrott’s grave,” she says as she points out a large stone between two tall trees. According to the plaque, Barrott was a drummer boy in the Continental Army, and when he died in Easton in 1851 at the age of 88, he was believed to be the last Revolutionary War veteran in Maryland.
“When we started cleaning up, we didn’t know there was a stone here until we cut away all of the ivy,” Duncan says.
As she did more research on the history of Spring Hill, Duncan found records and stories about the famous and powerful people who are buried there. The names of old Talbot families – Tilghman, Goldsborough, Covington, Shannahan, Wrightson and Hambleton, to name a few – are carved in stone everywhere.
“We have three governors of Maryland buried here,” she says. One is Samuel Stevens, Jr. who was governor from 1822 to 1826. Stevensville on Kent Island is said to have been named for him.
Near the North Street entrance to the cemetery is the Goldsborough plot, a section distinguished by its rows of very old headstones. Duncan says that before the cemetery was opened in 1790, it had been the tradition for local landowners to have their own private cemetery on their farms. Once the central cemetery concept caught on, families had their ancestors dug up and reinterred in Spring Hill. Some of those date to the 1600s.
Some of the first burials in the cemetery were the reinterred relatives of Dr. Ennalls Martin, who is buried next to his wife in the Martin family plot under a copse of old trees. Back off to the left of the Martins is the Baker plot. There, a tall piece of granite with a baseball, bat and glove finely chiseled into stone marks the grave of John Franklin Baker of Trappe. Baker, who died in 1963 at the age of 77, is better known in the area as Baseball Hall of Famer Frank “Home Run” Baker, who played for the Philadelphia Athletics and the New York Yankees from 1908 to 1922 and had a lifetime batting average of .307.
Boat builder C. Lowndes Johnson, a well-known Star-class racer and designer of the Comet sailboat, was laid to rest here.
Walking through the cemetery that sits on high ground near an old spring, hence the name, Duncan points out other stones of interest. The Right Reverend Henry Champlin Lay, the first Episcopal Bishop of Easton, is commemorated by an elaborate monument, complete with a miter and a crown, topped by a large cross. One couple, Helen and David Hardcastle, are buried under imposing blocks of marble. The locations where they lived before Talbot County are carved into their stones, each ending with “ETC.”
“It is surprising the number of children who are buried here,” she says, a testament to the fragility of life 200 years ago. She pauses to pull weeds grown around a child’s marker.
Volunteers have been working to repair and right vandalized stones. One volunteer, Darrin Clem, attended a class in New England to learn how to use a tripod to lift stones back on their base. “They are very heavy,” Duncan says.
Among the old and fading gravestones are signs that the burial ground is still in use. Duncan points out the recent grave of an old friend.
Now, the families return regularly to place flowers and clean up around the graves of their loved ones.
“It makes me feel good to see people coming back,” she says.
She says the Friends of Spring Hill Cemetery are always looking for more volunteers and donations. Anyone interested in helping out can reach her at francesd@goeaston.net or by calling 410-822-4128.

Dick Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He and his wife, Pat, live and sail in St. Michaels, Maryland. He can be reached at dickcooper@coopermediaassociates.com.