Here’s a Mystery for You

By DEAN DEXTER

The New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association focuses mainly on the preservation and care of the thousands of old private family burial places that dot the Granite State landscape, many hidden and forgotten in the state’s woodlands and forests. There are over 4000 listings for such old graveyards on the Association’s website, which are always in a state of being updated and reviewed for accuracy. Workshops to train people to restore and care for these burial grounds is a service the Association offers free of charge, although sometimes workshops are conducted (by invitation only, of course) for municipal, public cemeteries, maintained by towns and cities, where a majority of the state’s dead are interred.

But here’s a mystery, though one perhaps easily solved with a little digging (poor choice of words here, digging as in research), or by a reader who may know.

In the Town of Meredith, south toward Laconia on a corner of Meredith Center Road and Chemung Road, a little beyond Lake Wicwas, there is a carefully manicured plot of mowed grass, surrounded by a handsome stone wall and a clutch of pine and maple trees. It’s been kept up like this for years, probably little noticed by the thousands of motorists who’ve traveled by.

Is it a plot of land where someday a family plans to bury loved ones, as in generations past? Or more likely was it once a private burial ground where the interred were relocated, as often happens, because the owners had another use for the property, but never followed through?

No one we’ve talked to knows about the family ties to this spot, but everyone agrees this is indeed a graveyard, and not an empty one at that.

The late Meredith Historian Harold Wyatt told me there were once headstones and a large monument here, old ones, but they were removed to the Meredith Village Cemetery eight miles away maybe 50 or 60 years ago, but the remains they left behind and are still here.

There was a problem with vandalism, Wyatt suggested, despite the area being relatively open and exposed to the community, as it sits beside a main road and near several houses. For whatever reason, maybe because of the effort and expense, the relatives chose to buy a burial plot in Meredith Village and move the grave markers, but chose not to transfer the remains.

Thus the bones buried here rest in peace, nameless, but in a place well cared for, at least for now.

Dean Dexter is President of the NH Old Graveyard Association, and would appreciate any information about the people buried here. A version of this story appeared in the Fall 2019 edition of the Association’s newsletter, Available at this link.

Photos: June 24, 2018

Posted September 28, 2019
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