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01/17/2021 11:00 PMFirst Selectman Matt Hoey announced Jan. 14 that the Town of Guilford has received a $3,300 Neglected Cemetery Grant from the State of Connecticut Office of Policy and Management. The funds will be used to restore the town’s Smallpox Cemetery.
This is the second Neglected Cemetery Grant the town has received. The historic Goldsmith Cemetery at 1454 Moose Hill Road was repaired in 2019. The Smallpox Cemetery is a one-quarter acre parcel enclosed by stone walls and located in a deeply wooded area on the west bank of the East River in Guilford. It has been owned by the Madison Historical Society since 1949 and can be accessed through a right-of-way path for its members from the public road.
The cemetery proper is part of a larger nine-acre tract known as the “Pock Lot,”, which was purchased and used by the Town of Guilford between 1760 to 1814 to quarantine people exposed to the highly contagious smallpox virus. Colonial medicine was in its infancy at the time, but many of the scenes of quarantine resembled what we are now experiencing in the 21st century with the COVID virus.
Maintenance of the Smallpox Cemetery over the years has been mainly limited to brush clearing since the Madison Historical Society is a non-profit group primarily committed to the maintenance of the historic house museum and historic school building. As a result, the cemetery enclosure has been neglected. The grant money will be used to remove a downed tree on a section of the stonewall, repair several sections of the wall that have come down, and, if resources permit, reset the bronze plaque that has been loosened.
“I want to thank Joel Helander and Tracy Tomaselli for taking the lead and securing this grant for the Town,” saidHoey. “Many of these older smaller cemeteries in town have fallen into disrepair, but they are an important part of our history and it is important that they be preserved.”