Healey Gravestones By Bill Warnock

Healey family gravestone, Trinity Cemetery Seymour, CT.  PC WWH

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have an old song for any subject though I can’t sing worth a darn. When I turn to the Healey gravestones this one springs to my mind:

Oh, the chimney’s falling down, and the roof is caving in

The eaves let in the sunshine and the rain

And the only friend I have now is that good ole dog of mine and the little old log cabin in the lane

I leave it to you to opine why. Find more on YouTube at Shane Richards Public Domain Song series #10. The Little Old Cabin in the Lane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTGrl-FEgj8

Full disclosure—This is what I have heard, seen, and remember. Of course, I could be wrong.

Mom told me that G-Grandmother Healey (Alice Jane Bassett) placed the large Healey monument in the Trinity Cemetery in Seymour. According to the Trinity Cemetery Rules and Regulations published in 1915, Lots 57 and 58 in the Wheeler Addition belonged to Amos Bassett and [Alice’s husband] R[obert]. Healey. She had the smaller, individual stones brought up to the farm on Bungay. True to Yankee thrift, they were repurposed to practical use. The two large white limestone markers for Amos Bassett and Huldah Keziah Rowe were set flat as the walkway from the side porch to the driveway. Many others with what I thought were funny names, never realizing they were my family members, formed the walkway from the kitchen door to the outhouse. When I was a child, the farmhouse did have an indoor toilet and a bathtub but Grandma wanted us to use the outhouse to keep the well from running dry and the cesspool from running over. We feared but never did get bitten in the butt by a spider. We did take baths on Saturday with us brothers sharing the water. 

Gravestones are not as permanent as they might seem. Whole cemeteries may not be permanent. War, floods, neglect, and the ravages of time claim them. For example, the 1955 flood washed out graves from Union Cemetery. For a complete wipe-out, see the Rimmon Hill Cemetery description on page 94 of Seymour, Past and Present. This cemetery, where some 1790s smallpox victims were buried, was on a bluff above the Naugatuck River (an open sewer in my youth). It was in fact also an ancient Indian site with a natural spring that we called The Indian Burial Ground. Indian relics were found there but I never saw evidence of native American burials, just those of “les Anglais”, as James Fenimore Cooper would say. In the late 1950s, us boys waded across the river behind the Big Dip and dug for arrowheads. We must have dug up about an acre to a depth of about a foot with army trenching tools and trowels. There were no cemetery markers of any kind and only a few fragments of stones not more than six inches across with no text on them. Perhaps someone removed the larger stones to repurpose them or save them from vandals. At one point a trench shovel broke down through what turned out to be one of the graves. With no worries because we had been vaccinated, we explored it and found a skeleton, some small wood fragments and a silver-plated iron buckle. Later we put everything in a small produce crate and buried it where it was found. I have not been on site in decades but from across the river it looks like the sand and gravel company from Pine Bridge has consumed the entire site. 

As for the stones at the farm, the side porch stones are probably still there but Uncle Sonny bulldozed the ones in the outhouse path when he buried the stonewall that ran from the outhouse up towards the path to the well. There used to be a shed by the well that I think was an old chicken coop where Sonny sometimes parked his small tractor. It also had a huge old “put-put” engine, I think 2-cycle, with a drive wheel probably used to power a saw or silage blower. It had grease cups that I thought were ingenious. One day when Grandpa was fetching a pail of water from the well, he dropped a couple of matches that Bob and I scooped up. We took them into the shed to light them and got the brilliant idea to pour a little gas out from the lawnmower milk bottle and light that. We almost burned the shed down and caught hell for it. I also remember when Grandma Healey replaced her black, cast iron kitchen stove with a new, white electric model. The old stove was placed by the wall next to the outhouse where Pete and Ed Wanciak used it to boil down Maple Syrup. There were several stones placed along the inside of the wall separating the farmhouse lawn from the Miner’s property (Their house was built I think in 1723 by our ancestor, Samuel Bassett, who had the farmhouse built in 1794 for his son, Abraham, the Revolutionary War veteran. Grandma Rood also lived in Samuel Bassett’s place.). These stones were about 6 to 8 inches square in cross section and about 3 feet long with a groove chiseled in one face. They were originally buried to support gravestones so they would not sink into the ground and were most likely brought to the farm with the other stones. 

And then there is what I call the Pond Stone Adventure. As Randy has described, Uncle Sonny et all cleaned out the old ice pond and made it into a family picnic area with many amenities. In the old days, ice was cut from the pond and stored in an adjacent icehouse. To the right of that, covering the bank, was a huge load of field stones Sonny had dumped there over the years as he cleared the fields above and around the Balance Rock. Between where we parked cars by the large water company tank and the picnic area ran a small drainage ditch. Someone put a child’s stone as a bridge across this ditch. My memory is dim, but I remember no text and only a lily carved on its grayish marble face. There are 3 possible candidates for it: Harry Healey’s siblings Walter R., born 26 May 1872, died 13 January 1873; Alice Rowe, born 26 September 1881, died 18 April 1883; or an unnamed child of Harry’s brother, William S., born 28 March 1900, died 2 April 1900. It must have been brought back from Trinity Cemetery with the other stones as the ice pond site would not have been used for family burials. After the pond had fallen into disuse, I was visiting my Mom and thought it would be best to lock the stone in the bunkhouse for safekeeping, so I did. On a later visit, perhaps in the late 1990s, I was told that someone had jumped the fence and broken into the bunkhouse and found the stone. Though he was essentially a burglar, to my amazement this person reported finding the stone to the Seymour Police. I then took my Mom’s ride-on mower and trailer, went up to the pond, loaded the stone and drove it up the road to the farmhouse. I left it behind where the stone wall by the outhouse used to be. It may still be there. There used to be a raspberry patch there, and behind that by the wall where the swamp drained, I thought I could make out the site of an ancient springhouse for cooling dairy and other food items. 

As you can see, the ghosts of our ancestors are all around. Their gravestones may be revered but may be repurposed. People are curious about them and are easily alarmed when this is done. It’s not just Healey stones. A few years from now, there was alarm around here in DC Metro. Someone was found with a large quantity of stones from Arlington Cemetery. I think the investigation revealed that these were cast-offs with bad engraving or other imperfections. Beware if you intend to use an old gravestone for something other than a memory. Arrowheads may last longer than gravestones and dinosaur tracks last even longer. All of them remind me of the little old cabin in the lane that exists only in my mind.