The Wayland Historical Commission is requesting $72,000 in CPA funds at Town Meeting to restore 97 grave markers at the North Cemetery. The Commission believes that the preservation of Wayland’s cemeteries is an important part of preserving Wayland’s history because the gravestones are historically, genealogically, culturally and artistically significant. The North Cemetery is of particular importance to our community because it is the location of the first Sudbury settlement. In 2003, the first phase of restoration work began with the oldest section of the North Cemetery containing primarily 18th Century tombstones when the Town hired experts using CPA funds to conserve the grave markers in the Old Section of the cemetery. It is now time to restore the remaining sections of the cemetery where there are primarily 19th Century tombstones.
In the summer of 2015, the Town of Wayland hired Barbara Donahue, Cultural Resource Consultant to prepare a Preservation Management Plan for the North Cemetery. As part of the Plan, the condition of each stone in the Stoney Section of the North Cemetery was examined. For those stones identified as requiring conservation, the experts created a monument treatment proposal form which includes a photograph and physical assessment. As a result of the assessment, 97 stones in the Stoney Section were identified as requiring conservation intervention. The high number of stones requiring treatment can be attributed to the fact that this section of the North Cemetery has not previously been conserved. Recommended treatments for the stones can include resetting, stabilizing, drill and pinning, creating a new base and/or cleaning. For more information, the Preservation Monument Plan can be read on the Historical Commission’s page of the Town’s web site.
This project is important for a number of reasons. Many of the prominent residents who were instrumental in the development of Wayland and Sudbury are buried here with names such as Goodnow, Parmenter, Rice, Heard, Glezen, and Noyes. The monuments in the North Cemetery trace changes in both designs and social attitudes toward religious and moral views, death and eternity. They provide examples of the largely disappeared art of stone carving that must be considered finite and irreplaceable. Further, the North Cemetery contains stones of great breadth of iconography and style as well as high artistic merit. Thus, the North Cemetery can be considered a scenic landscape, similar to a park, and an artistic site, such as a sculpture garden or outdoor museum, which contains a collection of three dimensional artifacts.
A cemetery is different from all other types of historic sites. Most fundamentally, it contains the physical remains of past generations and is considered sacred, consecrated ground. The stones are also a collection of archives, having the same value as any paper archive. It is a storehouse of genealogical information and information concerning both the individual and our collective pasts.
Because this project seeks to protect artifacts of Wayland’s social, historic, cultural and artistic history from neglect, deterioration from the elements and the effects of time, the Wayland Historical Commission recommends approval of the warrant article to fund conservation of the grave markers in the North Cemetery.
