Pine Grove Cemetery

As you may know, I have been spending a large portion of my free time researching Jett’s ancestors. One branch of her family lived – and died – in Vermont. According to my records, six of them were buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery in North Springfield, VT. Despite it being the permanent resting place for most of Springfield’s earliest settlers, it is an active cemetery – with its own FaceBook page! This is your opportunity to be friends with a cemetery.

So I took a (very long) day trip to North Springfield recently to see if I could locate the headstones of Jett’s ancestors. It was also my first genealogical graveyard trip and an opportunity to test some of the headstone photography tips that I got at the Escapade. I loaded the car with some paper towels and “Awesome” cleaner (to clean dirty markers) and took, in addition to my cell phone, my trusty Mexican-bought digital camera, mostly to see which was better at capturing headstones.

Burlington to Springfield is about two and a half hours. I had no trouble finding the cemetery or gaining access, but I was somewhat daunted when I got there. It is a large cemetery with thousands of headstones. I was thinking it might take me several hours to find the headstones I was looking for, if, indeed, they existed at all. But I quickly figured out that the pre-20th-century headstones were all in the northwest quarter of the cemetery, which cut my estimated search time by 75%.

I was looking for two families: the Cooks and the Winchesters. As it turns out, I would have found both very quickly if I had started my search at the top of the hill rather than the bottom. But I didn’t, so I spent about 30 minutes discovering that Springfield was loaded with Woodwards, Bisbees, Howes and Lelands, but not many Cooks or Winchesters. But I found them, eventually.

The people I was looking for:

Salmon Winchester inscription

• Salmon Winchester, died 1887. I believe his name is pronounced like a 2-syllable “Solomon” rather than like the fish. He was a soldier in the Civil War. One of the things I learned from this trip – from cleaning his headstone – was that he was a member of “Co. A 3rd Reg. Vt. Vol.” A little research revealed that the 3rd Vermont Infantry (which Salmon’s company was incorporated into) was a highly regarded and decorated force in the Union Army. It suffered the highest casualty rate of any union unit in the war. I would like to research Salmon a bit further to find out what his personal experiences were.

Winchester-owned Springfield House

• David Winchester, Jr., died 1858.  Salmon’s father. He was a prominent man in Springfield and, for a time, a proprietor of the town’s only hotel. In addition to providing lodging, it provided libation and eventually became a target of the temperance movement.

Abigail Clarke’s broken headstone

• Abigail Clarke Winchester, died 1871. David’s wife and Salmon’s mother. Not much is known about her other than she was the wife of a prominent citizen of Springfield. She was born in Raynham, MA, and I have to wonder how a homebody like David Winchester, Jr., managed to find a court a woman from southeastern Massachusetts. Her headstone was in the worst shape of the six, broken in half.

• Susan “Bessie” Cook Winchester, died 1917. She is the link between the Cooks and the Winchesters.  Born in North Springfield, lived in North Springfield her entire life, died in North Springfield.  She was the granddaughter of Thomas Cook, one of the earliest settlers of Springfield, who came to Vermont from Rhode Island in 1795. But he died in New York and is not in the Pine Grove Cemetery. One of her brothers, Selden Cook, was a very prominent businessman in Springfield, operating a department store there for many years.

• Oliver Cook, died 1863.  Son of Thomas Cook, father of Susan Cook Winchester and Selden Cook.

• Polly Bruce Cook, died 1842. Wife of Oliver Cook. Her parents were reportedly Quakers and some of the earliest settlers of an adjoining town, but I have not been able to corroborate that.

The Vermont connection was broken when Abigail Winchester Stone, the daughter of Susan and Oliver Cook, married and moved to Massachusetts.

I found all 6 headstones and took pictures of them all with both cameras (conclusion: picture quality was pretty similar with both cameras). I then drove down to Springfield and spent about 90 minutes doing some research in the public library there, with the assistance of a very helpful librarian. I didn’t learn a lot that I didn’t already know about Jett’s relatives, but learned a lot about the town. For example, it wasn’t settled until the violence of the French and Indian War died down and an outpost was built there. And that the first roads were Indian trails. And that the original site of the town – along the Connecticut River – was abandoned because the land was grabbed up by speculators (the cost of over-speculation, I guess).

All-in-all, it was a very interesting and productive day. I hope to get an opportunity to do similar cemetery research when I get back to Massachusetts.

I am beginning to wish that some of our ancestors died in Florida. It would be a nice way to spend some time this winter. But, no, they were a bunch of northerners.