History & Mystery

“The condition of our parks, cemeteries, and public grounds, their embellishments and attractiveness, is the thermometer that registers the degree of refinement and culture of the individuals that compose the community.”

—Report of the [Portland Park] Commissioners, 1885-1886 Annual Report, p. 211.

“I think it not unreasonable to suppose that the disembodied spirit, for a time at least, retains a knowledge of its former mortal tenement. This probability should be an incentive to us to surround our places of burial with all pleasant associations, and that they should be well cared for as a duty to the dead, as attractions to the living.

—Historian William Goold, Portland in the Past, 1886, p. 521

History

The Portland burying ground at the East End of Portland was full.  It had served the city well from the founding in the 1600’s through the 1700’s, but now there was overcrowding and multiple internment in a single grave. And the population of Portland was growing.  The pre-Revolution population of under 2,000 had grown to over 8,000 by 1820.

In 1788 the city appointed a committee of three to find a new cemetery site.  It took them a long time.   In 1805, the town approved $2,000 for the purchase of land, but the location was not approved.  Finally, as the Eastern Cemetery continued to fill up, the Committee on Burying Grounds in 1829 approved the purchase of a small private cemetery from the Vaughan family, who had settled the West End of Portland.  They paid $200 an acre.  The Western Cemetery, then known as the Southern Cemetery, opened for burials in 1830. Additional acreage was added in 1839, and the city authorized a fence and the planting of shade trees.

In 1847, the Committee on Burying Grounds named the avenues and paths, with names of trees, and the central area was named Woodbine Grove and designated to be an open area, to create a park-like setting.   Unlike the Eastern Cemetery, which had a random design, the Western Cemetery had an organized plan to be a place with room for people to gather.

From 1830 until 1852, the Western Cemetery received the majority of the city’s dead.  It soon began to fill up.  The population of Portland had more than doubled from 8,000 in 1820 to over 20,000 by 1850.  Much of that growth was from immigration, especially Irish fleeing the great famine of 1845-1852.  Notably, a whole section of Western Cemetery is reserved for these recent Irish immigrants in what was called the “Catholic Ground.”   There were over 900 burials in this area; unfortunately, only 57 have headstones.

By the 1850s, Portland had new cemeteries.  Evergreen Cemetery, established in 1852, was much larger and it became the primary burial ground for Portland.  Calvary Cemetery in South Portland became the primary Catholic cemetery.    Evergreen’s appeal as a “garden cemetery” led to some bodies actually being moved from Western to Evergreen.  The last big effort at Western were the hillside tombs added by 1852.

Burials did continue at Western, but Evergreen and Forest City had become the primary burial sites. By 1888, the city of Portland halted all burials at Western Cemetery except for already purchased family plots.  While there were family members buried in these family lots well into the 20th century, most of the memorials at Western Cemetery represent the mid-19th century.

A review of burial records in Western Cemetery shows the effect of communicable diseases of the period.  About half of the documented burials were children, most dying of diseases that are vaccine-preventable today, including measles, mumps, whooping cough, dysentery, even cholera.  Among the adults, the biggest killer of all was tuberculosis (which they called consumption).

As the Western Cemetery entered the 20th century, it entered a long period of neglect.  The tool house was burned and abandoned.  During World War 2, the iron fence was removed for military use.  Because of its more remote location, it received very little security, and vandalism became rampant.  In 1982 the historian William Jordan wrote, “As of this moment, Western Cemetery is a desolate wasteland covered by deep grass littered with rubbish and hundreds of tombstone fragments.”

And then came the dogs.  By the late 20th century, Western Cemetery became a designated dog park and a cheap chain link fence was added as dogs ran freely, adding to the damage to headstones.

Efforts to restore the cemetery began in the early 21st century.  In 2001, the City Council banned dogs from the cemetery.  Also in 2001, the Stewards of the Western Cemetery was formed and a master plan to restore the cemetery was developed.   The Stewards re-organized in 2021 and is taking on the huge task of restoring and cleaning over 800 broken tombstones and identifying hundreds of others.   The Stewards are also working to restore the landscaping, rebuild the fence and tool house, and make the Western Cemetery a place to honor the lives of those 19th century people of Portland, Maine.

The all-volunteer Stewards of the Western Cemetery are engaged in a capital campaign to accomplish this restoration work.  It is important to note that the City of Portland’s responsibility is limited to mowing the grass, while the important maintenance and repair work must be done by the volunteer group.   We appreciate the community support.
The Stewards also offer guided tours of the cemetery to show the important history here, and the progress we are making in restoration.  Come visit!

Mysteries

Why is the grave of a church deacon in England known as the witch’s grave?

People are often seen sitting on the sarcophagus, lighting candles, and leaving coins, flowers, and other offerings.  The grave marker is certainly among the oddest in the cemetery. It’s the cemetery’s only horizontal grave markers. It’s one of the only grave markers made of brownstone. It has strange symbols and lettering on it. And it’s surrounded by an intricate iron railing.

The remains belong to Rev. John W. Chickering Baker from a Portland family, who died of tuberculosis at age 33.  The witch or vampire belief may derive from an historic link between the use of body parts of those who died of tuberculosis as a cure for the disease in the living.

It turns out, from a news account at the time, that the grave reflects the shape of the coffin, the symbols are Celtic, and the lettering forms standard Latin words for the deceased: “eternal rest,” “pray for the soul,” etc.

Why is the cemetery’s best known person back then relatively unknown today? He was a well-known novelist, the first American published in British literary journals, author of the first history of American literature, America’s first art critic, and the first supporter of Edgar Allen Poe’s fiction. He also founded the first public gymnasium in the United Staes, here in Portland!

Some say he was not better known because he was not based in Boston or New York, but in the “backwater of Portland, Maine.” Others argued it was because he was a jack of all trades. One historian opined that Neal “wrote for everything because he could not write long for anything.”

The most important person in Western may have been Prentiss Mellen, a US senator from Massachusetts until Maine separated in 1820, whereupon he became Maine’s first Supreme Court chief justice. Even his monument is relatively modest.

Why are most of the monuments for the residents of two of the city’s most dynamic growth decades so modest?

One possible explanation is that during the most active years of the cemetery the United States economy was faltering. When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, the year before the cemetery opened, he began trying to replace the Federal Reserve Bank with state banks. They proved incapable of supporting an expanding US economy, leading to the Financial Panic of 1837. It took several years for the economy to recover. So we find that the most prominent memorials—the hillside tombs—date from the late 1840s and the 1850s, once the national and local economies had recovered.

Why is the cemetery’s largest memorial to a teacher? Henry Jackson’s students commissioned the tall obelisk near the Western Prom from the well-regarded architect Thomas Sparrow, who designed Mechanics Hall downtown. Conforming to the theory of the influence of American national economics, this largest undertaking occurred in the 1850s.

Why are seven members in three generations of the Greene family buried in what appears to be a family plot in what should be the Strangers’ Ground for out-of-towners, transients, and the poor? Also, why are these Catholics buried outside the Catholic Ground? We have theories but no proofs. Burials in the Catholic Ground are almost exclusively for the Irish; the Greenes were from England. The first Greene burial occurred in 1856, after all of the family plots had been sold. So, perhaps, they simply decided to establish a family plot in the Strangers Ground, where earlier burials were unmarked. Then, too, Calvary, the Catholic cemetery in South Portland, would not open until two years later, in 1858. Also, directly across the path in front of their grave markers is a stone for a woman whose maiden name was Greene. Perhaps these Greenes were her relatives.

Why is there only one known black family plot in a cemetery that buried the city’s dead for almost a full generation? The burials are the family of Marianna de Remila from Dutch Guyana, now Surinam, on the northern coast of South America. Although she was a person of color, she said her father was a plantation owner. At the age of 11, she came with a guardian to Portsmouth, N.H., to be educated.

There, in 1807, at age of 20, she married Andrew Barnett, age about 46. He was a mariner, and they apparently moved to Portland before she died. At her death her name was Mary Ann Barnett.

Perhaps most of the other people of color who died in the city during the 1830s and ‘40s were buried near relatives already interred in the Eastern Cemetery. Indeed, one of Mary Ann Barnett’s 12 children is buried in the Eastern Cemetery

What oddity is found in the cemetery’s little known underground tombs?  In the middle of the upper part of the cemetery, the earth rises and is surrounded by granite edging but no headstones.  Beneath lie twelve underground rooms with 57 listed burials. The entry steps, also surrounded by granite edging, have been sealed with dirt.

The Jordan Tomb at one end has been viewed in the past decade. It contains 12 caskets, eight to one side, three to the other, and a single casket in the middle.

Only the middle casket has a glass top. Inside is a woman’s body wearing a red dress!  Stranger yet, Chris Peterson, the city’s cemetery crew supervisor, has seen two other viewing caskets in the city’s two other major cemeteries. Each has contained a woman’s body, and—wait for it!—each of them was wearing a red dress!

We have as yet no explanation for this mystery!

Then, there are the hillside tombs. Why does the Hilborn Tomb have 35 listed burials, which seems rather crowded? There is documentation that 11 of the 35 were moved to Evergreen Cemetery.  Were the bodies actually moved or duplicate stones added?  Over half of those buried there (19 of 35) were children.

Seth Bearce Hilborn (1788-1878) probably established the tomb.  He was a successful grocer with a store on Congress St.  He was wounded in the Portland Rum Riot of 1855.  The Rum Riot began when it was revealed that the Mayor of Portland, and the father of the temperance movement had alcohol stored at City Hall.  Perhaps Mr. Hilborn wanted to sell alcohol at his store.  His store burned down in the fire of 1866, and Mr. Hilborn decided to retire.  He lived to be 89.

Eli Goss (1814-1888) was also a grocer in Portland.  He served in the Aroostook War in 1839, and was the only person to receive a pension for being wounded in that conflict, in which the Maine militia fought loggers from New Brunswick who were stealing Maine timber.   Reportedly, the only death from the Aroostook War was a bear; Mr. Goss may have been the only injury.

Frank Amos Smith (1829-1904) married the granddaughter of Seth Hilborn.  He served in the 1st Maine Civil War.  He survived the war, and was still working as a carpenter at age 75 when he died after falling off a ladder.

The Ten Broeck Tomb has only 8, two of whom were moved.   The Ten Broeck family was one of the old Dutch families of New York.  The Rev. Petris Stuyvesant Ten Broeck, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, came to Portland to serve as the rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

Rev’ Petrus’ son was Dr. Peter Stuyvesant Ten Broeck (1822-1867).  He served 20 years as an Army Surgeon.  He was stationed in New Mexico Territory in 1847, just after the Mexican War.  He as the first US representative to visit the Hopi Indians.  After the Civil War, he was promoted to Lt Colonel, and died of a strep infection at Fort Preble in Portland.

And then, of course, there is the Longfellow Tomb.  In 1986, William Jordan found that both the Longfellow and the Cummings Tombs were empty…swept clean.  It appears that many of the hillside tombs were used as receiving tombs, and it may have always been the plan to move many of the bodies to another location.   But the Longfellow family cannot be located at Mount Auburn, Cambridge (where Henry was buried) or at Evergreen.  It is unlikely that a famous family would not be listed.   Where are they?   One possibility is grave robbers:  it is known that the hillside tombs were broken into in the late 20th century.