Cedar Hill Cemetery & The Old State House (August, 2003)
by the Cranky Yankee
(photos by C. LeBeau)
The Joey Zone and I
went on a Saturday morning tour of
Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.
Cedar Hill is a large Victorian-to-modern cemetery created during the
American rural
cemetery movement
of the mid-1800s.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery in
Boston was the first
of those cemeteries and most cemeteries in this form were modeled after Mt.
Auburn. You should see this place! It's big...and once
you go through the
stone gates, you wouldn't know you were in a 
cemetery. There are ponds
and
ducks and woods; it's like being in a park. You don't get to the stones and
monuments
right
away...they're further down the road.
This particular tour was conducted by
Ruth-Shapleigh Brown of the
Connecticut Gravestone Network. The theme was symbols on gravestones. She
did the tour
with the cemetery's secretary and tour coordinator, Irene. It was
a two-hour walk and quite informative (I got lots of pix). We also saw several
famous graves including
Samuel Colt,
J.P. Morgan,
Dr. Horace Wells (who
discovered anesthesia), and
Katharine Hepburn.
There
are some gorgeous monuments there like one for a fellow named Russell. His
exact
doppelganger (in stone) sits on top of his
grave...very life-like. And many of
the mausoleums have windows on the front
doors, so you can peak in. A few of them have Tiffany windows in the back, and
it looks great when the
light shines thru them. And there's one huge obelisk
that was
struck by lightning in a
storm a few years ago, and you
can see the lightning
mark right down the
side of the
stone. It's
cool!!!
Cedar Hill has regular tours often
during the nice-weather season. I'm planning
on going to the next one. Irene
also said they're planning a crematorium tour sometime this fall, but they don't
have a date yet (she says "Come see where we shake and bake
them!" hahaha!).
I'm on their mailing list, so she'll let us know as soon as they set the date.
After our tour of Cedar Hill, Joey
and I went to downtown Hartford. First we stopped at the Spice Indian Restaurant
for lunch and had some nice curried chicken. Then we checked out the
Old State House. I've never been there, so
I had to see it. There is a statue of
Thomas Hooker (founder
of Hartford) out in the courtyard, right near some
old stocks. We saw the old legislators
and court rooms,
and there are some
period costumes on display on
the second floor. Also, the original Justice statue from on top of the State
Capitol dome is there, too. It's made of wood and really old, and it's falling
apart. They took it down
off the dome when the arm holding the scales fell off.
Ooops!
But the big draw there is the
John Steward
Old Curio Museum. It's just one room,
but man, the things in
that room!
This guy Steward, back in 1797, put together all kinds of weird stuff and got
permission of the governor to house it all in the State House. Of course, all
that original stuff is gone now, but they replicated it and reopened the museum
in recent years. There's a two-headed calf, a two-headed fetal pig, a huge
moth-eaten stuffed tiger, snake skins, stuff birds galore, a stuffed catamount
(mountain lion), deers' heads, a
mountain goat, bear skins, dried bugs, a skate and various stuffed fish, and a
Unicorn horn! (It's probably a narwhal tusk, but they have it labeled as a
unicorn horn). There's also a gift shop down in the basement of the
building where I bought a couple of
books, including one about the legend of
the
Charter Oak Tree. It's all
pretty cool, and it's free!
Afterwards, we stopped by the
Wadsworth Atheneum, but just at
the gift shop (where I bought another book!). On the way home, we drove through
Bolton Notch and stopped at an old burial ground on Rt. 44, where they had
18th-century gravestones
carved by the Manning Family, Gershom
Bartlett (the
Hook and Eye Man), and Zerubbabel Collins. We also stopped at an 
antique store
in Coventry where I bought
some old New England postcards. We ended the day with lemon meringue ice cream
and watermelon
sherbet at Friendly's in Willimantic.
So
despite the muggy heat and threat of rain, we had a nice day. Anybody
else doing any New England traveling (besides us?). Please let us know! Join the
New
England Anomaly e-mail list and tell
everybody about your adventures!
Back to Travel
Journal
The Joey Zone and I
went on a Saturday morning tour of
Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.
Cedar Hill is a large Victorian-to-modern cemetery created during the
American rural
cemetery movement
of the mid-1800s.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery in
Boston was the first
of those cemeteries and most cemeteries in this form were modeled after Mt.
Auburn. You should see this place! It's big...and once
you go through the
stone gates, you wouldn't know you were in a 
