By Sabrina Eager
Art by Sarah Berman
My first time entering the Dartmouth cemetery was for a picnic. It was summer, and we ate our FOCO-to-go meals atop a picnic blanket under a swarm of mosquitoes and a sprinkle of unexpected summer rain. We talked about why the bugs liked some of us more than others, how the balsamic on our veggies was too sweet, how getting ice cream to-go is always risky, especially in the summer heat. I didn’t notice the names on the stones around us.
Stories like these are what the cemetery seems to resemble for many Dartmouth students. It’s a quirky meeting spot for smoking, a peaceful place to walk your dog, a shortcut to some dorms.
I never really thought of it as a place for mourning until I got involved with the College’s cemetery restoration efforts. At first, I really looked forward to the work. I found the cemetery peaceful. I believed it would be a place to bring me closer to the dead, to those whom I had lost the year before, those whom I have never been able to properly mourn.
But then I started considering the implications of the project. Who are the dead that are receiving care in this project? What is the relationship between the care-givers and the care-receivers? The cemetery houses the bodies of eight past Dartmouth presidents, several past treasurers, trustees, professors, students, and other members of the Hanover community.[1] Amidst these, only two mark the graves of Black bodies. These belong to two Black women who lived in Hanover during the 19th century: Jane Wentworth and her daughter Peggy Jane Parks.[2]
Dartmouth was built, in part, on the backs of enslaved people, yet there are more graves belonging to the relatives of Dartmouth’s first president Eleazer Wheelock than belonging to Black people at the cemetery. Wheelock owned at least 19 slaves. Another even larger family plot holds the relatives of Nathan Lord, the college’s sixth president. During his tenure, he transitioned from believing in abolition to being pro-slavery. His belief that there was no moral way to end the enslavement of Black people led the Board of Trustees to force him to resign.[3] Yet he and his family are honored at the cemetery. Today’s Dartmouth students are tending to his grave through the institution’s restoration efforts.
Jane Wentworth and Peggy Jane Parks were not the only Black people living in Hanover during the 19th century. Jane and her husband raised Peggy Jane and their five other children in a neighborhood known as Negro Hill among several other Black families living in Hanover, down near Mink Brook.
So where are their bodies?
Arthur Chivers and William Worthington Dewey are the two people known to have kept records on the Dartmouth cemetery prior to the current project. Their records state that there should be at least 25 other graves belonging to the Black people who lived in Hanover.[4]
Where are they? Can we find them? Or will this project center its efforts and the labor of current Dartmouth students on tending to the cracks of headstones already lucky enough to be known?
In my eyes, this project comes down to two main concerns. For one, this project relies heavily on the exploitation of student workers to care for the founders of an uncaring institution. Additionally, this project provides just a single example of a very American problem.
Looking towards the first issue, let’s think of the care laborers in this project: predominantly student volunteers. While members of the institution of Dartmouth who are affiliated with this project have in some way provided us volunteers with care — for example, they invited us to a lunch, they were very responsive to our emails and questions, they gave us a free tour of the property, etc. — the only “compensation” we earned was appreciation. The project relies on the work of student volunteers who cannot receive financial compensation for their work, to care for the graves of founding members of the very institution that continues to withhold necessary care. An institution that continues to fail to provide adequate physical and mental health support, an institution that continues to deny students sufficient financial aid and sufficient pay for student jobs, an institution that lost four students in one academic year. This project began just a month after the fourth loss. It is hard to see this project as anything but a public portrayal of Dartmouth’s ability to care for the dead.
Now, let’s consider the fact that the Dartmouth cemetery project is merely one example of a larger issue. To consider this point, I looked outwards. While working with Dartmouth’s cemetery project, I looked into some articles that discussed other communities’ cemetery restoration projects. Far too often, it seems that the communities that engage in cemetery restoration work are those whose dead have largely salvageable graves and available financial resources.
One article’s themes centered on legacies of historic towns. It talked about a local cemetery that housed the settlers of a small town in Colorado.[5] This mentioned cemetery likely houses all-white people, specifically people who traveled west for the sake of “manifest destiny.” The article was looking for individual donations and volunteers. Another article discussed a project that centered on familial ancestry.[6] It covered a small Irish Catholic cemetery in Illinois, a place that kept the bodies of people once highly persecuted in the United States. Still, the cemetery housed people who likely had the financial resources and abilities to pay for plots of land among members of their own community.
Both of these articles discuss our individual responsibilities as the living to preserve history. The first article states that “today, the Cleora cemetery is the only hint of where the small railroad town used to be,” implying that losing this marker would signal losing tangible references to the town’s colonial beginnings. Pride in place seems to be the most important propeller for care in this case. The article describes pushed-over headstones “that need at least a little bit of help.”[7] On the other hand, the article on the Irish cemetery begins immediately with reference to ancestry: “An Irish Catholic cemetery here that is almost two centuries old got a much-needed face-lift last week thanks to the Reilly Family from California that has ancestors buried there.”[8] Many of the stones at this site are described as having sunk beneath the earth due to a foundation made of sand. Both of these cemeteries seem to be salvageable. Care workers in these articles are depicted as heroic for marking the history either of place or of familial lineage.
These cemeteries mirror the social context of Dartmouth’s cemetery to varying degrees. They are home to the bodies of people who were rich and white in life. Additionally, we cannot forget that Dartmouth’s cemetery exists on unceded Abenaki land, like the rest of Dartmouth’s campus. Thus, the social context of this project reminds us that while respecting the dead is an important practice, it is also a practice that perpetuates many racist global systems, systems in which Dartmouth participates and reinforces.
Recently, the New Yorker published the article “When Black History is Unearthed, Who gets to Speak for the Dead?” about the care labor involved in grave restoration.[9] It specifically discusses preserving Black history and the graves of Black people. The article discussed the people hoping to restore or memorialize lost gravesites. It also raises the political questions of what we should do with the remains of bodies politicized even in death.
The graves mentioned in the article are primarily in Durham, North Carolina. We learn about Geer Cemetery, where only 200 headstones remain despite the fact that the site houses at least 1500 bodies. Other mentioned cemeteries include Hickstown and Violet Park, ones with no remaining headstones. Debra Gonzalez-Garcia, the president of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, is quoted in the article: “Hickstown’s part of the freeway,” she said. “Violet Park is a church parking lot.”[10]
There is not a single right answer for how to care for the dead whose gravesites have turned into highways and church parking lots. Do we unearth them? Do we let the bodies rest? The article discusses a proposed law: an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a law that would function like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The need for a law, for politicians to get involved at a time when teaching about the legacy of slavery in schools is already so debated, marks an important distinction between graves that house Black bodies, particularly those of enslaved people, and those that house white bodies.
Dartmouth’s cemetery is haunted by the same legacies of erasure and privilege. The project perpetuates inequitable care relations. While the people buried at the cemetery and elsewhere in Hanover did not live around the world in a global context, the care they are receiving — or not receiving — represents a larger issue. When only those wealthy enough to buy a plot are the ones who end up receiving care, we are only continuing to reinforce existing institutions. While this perpetuation may not have much tangible economic impacts, such as it would in an education or health care system, it is yet another manifestation of when those who require the most amount of care receive the least.
So what happens now? Dartmouth’s Center for Social Impact is collaborating with the current cemetery project team and hosting a workshop to demonstrate how to clean headstones in the spring. I don’t think I’ll be there. I hope I can spend more time in the cemetery once the ice and snow have melted and the stones all show their faces alongside the growths of new spring plants. I hope it can remain a place of peace, a place to bring me closer to the dead. I will go with Jane Wentworth and Peggy Jane Parks in mind. Their names will add to the list of those I have to mourn. Maybe one day we’ll find other missing lives and be able to add them to the list too.
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[1] “Did you know that Dartmouth College has its own cemetery?,” Rauner Special Collections Library, last modified January 24, 2011, https://raunerlibrary.blogspot.com/2011/06/did-you-know-that-dartmouth-college-has.html.
[2] Anna Koester, “Where are the People of Color,” Tales of the Old Burial Ground (podcast), November 14, 2019, https://dartmouthcemetery.podbean.com/e/episode-5-where-are-the-people-of-color/.
[3] Matt Golec, “Research helps Dartmouth confront the ties to slavery in its past,” Valley News, September 9, 2019, https://www.vnews.com/Dartmouth-to-explore-past-ties-to-slavery-28085959.
[4] Koester, “People of Color.”
[5] “For our founders: Salida woman hopes to restore historic Cleora Cemetery,” Fox 21 News, September 9, 2021,
https://www.fox21news.com/news/local/for-our-founders-salida-woman-hopes-to-restore-historic-cleora-cemetery/.
[6] Dean Cousino, “Respecting ancestors / St. John’s Irish cemetery gravestones standing again,” Monroe News, September 14, 2021, https://www.monroenews.com/story/news/history/2021/09/14/respecting-ancestors-st-johns-irish-cemetery-gravestones-standing-again/8305964002/.
[7] “For our Founders.”
[8] Cousino, “Respecting ancestors.”
[9] Jill Lepore, “When Black History is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?,” New Yorker, September 27, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/04/when-black-history-is-unearthed-who-gets-to-speak-for-the-dead.
[10] Lepore, “Black History Unearthed.”
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