Restoring Cranston's forgotten cemeteries

Colin Parkhurst thinks there are better ways to honor Cranston’s dead.  Many of the city’s 84 historical cemeteries are hidden, he said, buried by overgrowth, trash and years of neglect. Most of the graves, he said, date to the Revolutionary or Civil War periods, and many include veterans of those wars. As the new Chair of the Cranston Historical Cemetery Commission, Parkhurst is determined to clean up and catalog the cemeteries, so that “50 to 100 years down the road, when the gravestones can’t be seen or read anymore, we’ll know who is where, and people aren’t lost to time.”  “These were people.” Parkhurst said, “It’s valuable to show respect to those who came before us, and to do our part to preserve that history.” After attending a cemetery clean up several years ago in Warwick, where he lived at the time, Parkhurst was recruited by Margaret “Pegee” Malcolm, Chair of the Rhode Island Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries and of the Warwick Historical Cemetery Commission, to help maintain Warwick’s historical cemeteries. He enjoyed the projects. When he moved to Cranston, Malcolm suggested he join the Cranston Commission, which had been inactive for a number of years. A mechanical engineer, the volunteer role on the Commission suits Parkhurst, whose love of history, attention to detail, and ability to visual how dozens of neglected properties will someday be a  well cataloged and accessible record of the City’s past residents. The tools with which he has to work are scant. The first record of the historical cemeteries was made by James Arnold in the 1890s, and consists of crude notes and vague directions that refer to landmarks that would be recognizable to someone in that era, but today resemble an early form of the “take a left where the Almacs used to be” instructional style that cartoonist Don Bousquet and ProJo Columnist Mark Patinkin frequently poke fun at. According to the Commission’s September 2016 annual report, there are 48 cemeteries that have no confirmed location, and may have been destroyed or lost to time. Parkhurst hopes to recruit volunteer historians who can help reconcile Arnold’s notes to historical and modern maps, and catalog their findings. The state commission, he says, has a large online database, but because Cranston’s commission hadn’t been active, the local entries in the state database are not complete. Another goal is to provide GPS coordinates for all of the city’s cemeteries, so that whether they are on public or private land, they are never lost to time again. There is less cerebral work to be done too. From spring to fall, the Commission needs help clearing brush, cleaning up trash, and resetting stones, something Parkhurst thinks is a great project for scouting troops and others who need community service hours. This is work Parkhurst relishes. Before the ground froze, he spent several weekends last fall locating buried stones and in some cases “had to dig through 6 inches of dirt to find a stone.” The Commission is hopeful the City Council will provide a small budget so they can purchase tools and supplies. Currently, their small collection of tools is stored at the Sprague Mansion, and usually, volunteers bring their own shovels and tools. He tries to get leaf bags and other consumable supplies donated. He said Evelyn Wheeler, the former Chair of the Commission, has taken on the project of encouraging the City Council to create a tax credit for people who maintain historic graves on their property, so that they have an incentive to keep the stones and land up. For now, he’s focused on the 3-5-year plan to locate and identify all of the historic cemeteries, and to clean and catalog them, bringing them into a “low maintenance” state that a volunteer could take care of a few hours a month.  See the locations of historical cemeteries in Cranston here: http://www.rihistoriccemeteries.org/newsearchcemetery.aspx. To volunteer, contact Parkhurst at 401-440-1000 or colineparkhurst@gmail.com.