Final Thoughts: A Listener Shares the Story of His Local Cemetery

On this episode of Our American Stories, for our regularly occurring Final Thoughts series, Our American Stories listener and regular contributor, Bill Bryk, gives us a tour of his local cemetery in Antrim, New Hampshire, painting a vivid picture of the people buried there and the lives they lived well.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about well just about everything here
on this show. And one of our favorite regular features
is a feature called Final Thoughts. And today our regular
contributor Bill Brake tells us a story from his little
town Antrim, New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Andrim's voters elected me a cemetery trustee in twenty eighteen.
I'd help two other trustees govern the town's for public cemeteries.
It's meant receiving occasional telephone calls from relatives of deceased
persons who wanted to be buried in Antrim. Among the
usual reasons for this or that the deceased was born

(00:59):
or spent many happy summers in the town. The callers
generally asked about getting the grave dug. I gather the
correct term of art is opening the grave. I refer
them to a pleasant, good natured and compassionate gentleman with
a back hoe who performs this office for a funeral
parlor in the neighboring town of Hillsborough, and for anyone
else in the area who needs his services. Antram's public

(01:23):
cemeteries are Center Meetinghouse, Hill, North Branch and Over East.
I visited them all before my election. The town's Department
of Highways had maintained them well. Three of the four
are now full with many dark gray, heavily weathered slate
markers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only North Branch

(01:46):
is active, which is to say new customers are welcome. Recently,
after a friendly and sympathetic chat with an older woman
who wishes to bury her son's remains here, I strolled
down to Cemetery Road, a well kept dirt road that
borders my property, just beyond an unnamed stream that flows
from my land towards Steele's Pond and the North Branch River.

(02:09):
It was amidst the heat wave in mid July twenty nineteen.
The slightest breeze was welcome. As is usually the case
with rural dirt roads, the trees lining both sides of
the right of way had grown tall and large enough
to form a kind of green tunnel, which I found
beautiful and soothing. Some of the older trees, where at

(02:29):
the top of the hills, seemed to have grown as
mirrors of one another, their upper branches entwined. Perhaps they
are ideal lovers, growing side by side and together completing
one another. I reached the cemetery and found the second
gate open. So I entered and found my caller's family plot.
It is large and inspires confidence that her relatives will

(02:51):
find room there long after I am gone. When I
was a child, my family lived at fifty seven Columbia
Street in Mohawk, New York. First house my parents owned.
It was across from the Mohawk Cemetery. My mother occasionally
noted that, whatever one might say about a cemetery, its
occupants were quiet neighbors. I often walked through it. I

(03:13):
found the markers a kind of history book, nearly all
bearing the names of ordinary people whose lives were quietly
lived in a small town away from the shouting and
tumult of the great world. The Mohawk Cemetery had only
one distinguished occupant, France's Elias Spinner, who had been Herkimer

(03:33):
County sheriff, a militia general, a three term US representative,
once Democrat twice a Republican, and Treasurer of the United
States under Presidents Lincoln, Johnson and Grant. He was also
the first federal executive to hire women for clerical work
on the same basis as men. He was renowned for
his flamboyantly elaborate signature, which appeared on millions of United

(03:57):
States notes. He had developed it consciously to discourage counterfeiting.
The signature appears on his grave marker in the Mohawk Cemetery.
It also appears on the plinth of his monument across
the Mohawk River in Herkimer, New York, which also bears
this quotation. The fact that I was instrumental in introducing
women to employment in the offices of the government gives

(04:20):
me more real satisfaction than all the other deeds of
my life. Coming back to my summer's day in the
North Branch Cemetery, I paused for a few moments to
look north across the valley of the North Branch River
toward Campbell Mountain in Hillsborough. Then I went down the
rows of stones, noting several fellows who cantered off with

(04:43):
the New Hampshire Dragoons during the Civil War, and a
quantity who had served in World Wars one and two.
One fellow had served in both when I was a boy.
Such men and women call themselves retreads. There were also
a few who had served in Vietnam. There were also
a f a few revolutionaries, mostly identified by the militia

(05:03):
company in which they had served. Although I know he's
buried in North Branch, I couldn't find a marker for
the long lived George Gates born August eighth, seventeen fifty
three and died December thirteenth, eighteen forty five. He had
fought at Bunker Hill on June seventeenth, seventeen seventy five,

(05:25):
among those commanded, don't fire until you see the whites
of their eyes and help prove as One British officer
wrote that the Americans are full as good soldiers as ours.
One fellow named Tuttle, an old New England family, had
a few small stones placed atop his marker. It's a

(05:46):
touching custom derived from the Jews, flowers, fade stones and dewer.
Perhaps a secular meaning might be found too, As long
as one is remembered by someone, one never truly dies.
So I found a suitable pebble in the dirt road
I was on and placed it among the others on
the tunnel marker. Two markers were particularly memorable. One read

(06:13):
Archie F. Perry eighteen eighty six. Nineteen fifty an honest man.
There are worse things for which to be remembered. The
other was a bench for a member of an old
Antrim family whose relatives I know. It reads Dennis C.
Gales Senior, nineteen forty three to two thousand and eight.

(06:34):
We sit here thankfully he was the man. He didn't
have to be. There were several other benches about North Branch.
They reminded me of the nineteenth century custom of picnicking
in cemeteries, bringing the baskets to the family plots. Before
Sir Alexander Fleming identified penicillin, death was a constant visitor

(06:54):
for many families. Perhaps this custom allowed people to share
good times with their deceased relatives. It waned by the
twenties as early deaths became less common. The peenchas also
reminded me of Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet
and men of letters who retired to Savannah, where he
had been born. He often sat by his parents grave

(07:15):
in Bonaventure's cemetery, at least in part for the view
of the harbor and of the arriving and departing merchantmen.
He once saw a ship with an intriguing name. Heading
down to the sea, he did some research at the
port authority where he confirmed the ship's name and looked
up her destination. That information gave him a two line poem,

(07:37):
Aiken's tombstone is a bench. He wanted people to sit
and enjoy a Martini by his grave on it is
the poem which is his epitaph Cosmos Mariner destination unknown.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
And great job as always to Robbie Davis for his
work you're at our American Stories. And a special thanks
to Bill Brike for this piece. He's one of our
regular contributors and just a great voice. And my goodness,
I keep thinking of Archie F. Perry eighteen eighty six
to nineteen fifty and all it says on his grave

(08:19):
marker are three words an honest man. It doesn't get
better than that. And by the way, we'd love to
hear your final thought stories, stories about death, stories from
people who are in their final days. There are not
more interesting stories than that. Or it could even just
be a eulogy. My goodness, the eulogies we heard from

(08:40):
the Kobe Bryant Memorial, from the memorial of Arnold Palmer,
which is it's some of the best material we've ever
put on the air. The storytelling is so beautiful again.
Send all of your stories and suggestions to our American
stories dot com. Bill Brike of his storytelling from the

(09:02):
little part of America called Antrim, New Hampshire here on
our American Story