Over 200 years ago, near the base of Lyndeborough Mountain, some of Greenfield’s earliest European settlers, the Fletchers and the Savages, buried family members in what is believed to be the town’s first cemetery.
When the cemetery was created in the 1790s, Greenfield’s forests had all been logged and cleared for farming, and the cemetery would have had a stunning view of the mountains to the west, including North Pack and Grand Monadnock. North Pack was just visible through the spring leaves when I saw Fletcher/Savage cemetery last week.
In September, the town’s cemetery trustees asked the Select Board to begin the process of declaring the Fletcher-Savage cemetery “abandoned,” which would let the town take over its maintenance and administration and add it to Greenfield’s list of official cemeteries. Jim Fletcher, a descendant of the Fletchers buried there, gave the town permission to assume control. (Jim is also a Cemetery Trustee, along with Roger Lessard, Karen Day and Catrina Mamzcak).
Last week, I happened to ask Jim if he had any time to show me the cemetery, and he invited me to come along with Jim Morris and Caleb Platte from Greenfield Department of Public Works and Gregory Potter of Potter Tree Service, along with some of his crew, who were making an official visit to the site.
Jim led the way to the cemetery, which is in the woods off the Class VI portion of Coach Road, (which is not a road I would ever recommend driving on). The cellar hole of the original Fletcher house and barn can still be seen on the east side of Coach Road. Simeon Fletcher Sr., who is noted in Greenfield history as “the first person to grow enough hay to keep a cow over the winter,” originally built a cabin home at the bottom of Lyndeborough Mountain. 40 years later, his descendants replaced it with a large brick house, which later burned down.
“Apparently, it was quite a nice house. It had four chimneys and a big central staircase,” Jim said. “But the big house burned down in the mid-1800s, and John Fletcher moved over to where we are now.”
Jim says as far as he knows, the Fletchers and the Savages were not related, but were neighbors on the hillside along the bottom of Lyndeborough Mountain.
“They probably just chose this spot for a burial ground halfway between their two farms,” Jim said.
According to documents at the Historical Society — which Lenny Cornwell kindly looked up for me — four men who served in the Continental Army were once buried at the Fletcher-Savage graveyard: Simeon Fletcher Sr., Simeon Fletcher Jr., Phillip Fletcher, and their neighbor, John Savage.
“No one has ever found Simeon Sr.’s grave,” Jim said. “We don’t know if it’s here, or if it’s somewhere else in town, and is just unmarked.”
The stones of John Fletcher, who died in 1792 at just 25 years old, John Savage, who died in 1821 at 77, and Mary Savage, who died in 1825 at age 78, are still there.
According to historic records, Phillip and Simeon Jr. responded to the call for soldiers on April 20, 1775, when the Minutemen fought the battles of Lexington and Concord. In 1777, the brothers marched to Fort Ticonderoga, and in 1780, they were serving at West Point when Benedict Arnold tried to surrender Ticonderoga to the British.
The record also states that the Fletcher brothers were at West Point when the Continental Army stretched a massive iron chain across the Hudson River to block British ships, and that “while Simeon Jr. was a very athletic man, he was able to lift only three links of the chain.”
Jim placed veterans’ memorials and flags, provided by the cemetery trustees, at the Fletcher and Savage graves.
The cemetery is located in what was called the “Lyndeborough Slip” — unsettled land between Peterborough and Lyndeborough — on early maps of the region, before Greenfield was established as a town.
“We used to hike up here when we were kids,” Jim said. “We walked down from the farm, down the road, up the hill, and we poked around in here in the cellar hole. One time, we found some old metal pots. “
The cemetery is on a small plot, which is now surrounded by privately owned land on either side, and no public right of way exists. The town plans to request a right of way to access the cemetery, and the cemetery trustees hope to someday build steps up to the cemetery, which is a steep walk from the old road.
Jim and his family now live at the intersection of Fletcher Farm Road and Etna Road, in the farmhouse Jim’s grandfather was born. Not far from the top of Fletcher Farm Road, where the road meets up with another Class VI that eventually becomes Blanchard Road, there is a cellar hole that is said to have been built by a member of the Savage family when he returned from the Civil War.
Greg Potter from Potter Tree Service and Jim Morris and Caleb Platte from the DPW discussed options for tidying up the cemetery. In recent years, a massive, double-trunk white pine fell in the middle of the plot, miraculously missing all the graves, and needs to be removed. Since the cemetery is surrounded by privately owned land, the town will be reaching out to the landowners about accessing the plot with tree equipment.
The town also maintains the Whittemore cemetery, which is located at the corner of East Road and New Boston Road, and contains the graves of other early settlers, and the Knight cemetery, which contains the graves and a monument to the four Knight children who all died of diphtheria in the mid-1800s, and a sibling who died earlier. (By coincidence, I wrote about the Knight/Shea family for the “House and Home” page last week.)
Jim will present the history of the Fletcher/Savage cemetery for Greenfield Historical Society on Saturday, June 6.
For more information about Greenfield’s historic cemeteries and graveyard, go to greenfield-nh.gov/cemetery-trustees.