The founders, builders and characters whose stories are bound up with this ground — and with the village it has always served.
1799 – 1871
A miller by trade, Josiah Hale settled the valley in 1841 and laid out the village a decade later. In 1854 he deeded nine acres on the hill above the millpond to a board of trustees “for use as a burying ground for…
Read their story →1804 – 1879
For more than twenty years Eliza Hale kept the village's only library — two shelves of books in her front parlor, lent freely to any child who would return them clean.
Read their story →1822 – 1898
Dr. Croft enlisted as an assistant surgeon in 1862 and served through the war's final campaigns. He came home to a town with no doctor and stayed forty years — delivering, by the count in his own ledger, more than …
Read their story →1840 – 1924
Cap Reedy dug the graves, set the stones, kept the ledger, and planted nearly every mature tree now standing on the grounds. When he retired in 1922 the trustees gave him the only thing he asked for: the promise of a plo…
Read their story →1851 – 1933
“Miss Vance,” as three generations of pupils knew her, opened a single-room school in 1874 and taught there until 1920. The school she started bears her married name to this day.
Read their story →1921 – 1944
Raymond Doyle left the village school in 1939, worked two years at the Finch store, and enlisted in 1942. He was returned home in 1948 and reinterred at the head of Veterans' Field; the memorial flagstaff there was raise…
Read their story →1888 – 1944
Albert Finch ran the village's general store and quietly paid for more than one family's plot when they could not. His bequest in 1944 established the cemetery's care fund, which maintains the grounds to this day.
Read their story →