Historic Final Resting Place For The Dead In Vernon Getting New Life

VERNON, CT — A state grant is helping the Vernon Cemetery Department preserve and inject new life into an old burial ground.

The elements and its age, along with remnants from thousands of passing automobiles every day in what is in modern times a peculiar location, the Old Dobsonville Cemetery, also known as Southwest Cemetery, has been a bit beaten up.

Some of the headstones had been tough to read over the past few years and had gone crooked from roots, frost heaves, a wayward vehicle in one case and other sorts of natural causes.

But over the past few weeks, cemetery department employees have spent more than 235 hours cleaning and straightening the grave markers.

And it shows.

The cemetery is located at 173 Talcottville Road on the local map. That's state Route 83 at the corner of Dobson Road. Old Dobsonville is the final resting place for more than 200 people. The oldest grave dates from the 1700s and the most recent in 1920. Zenas Skinner, a Revolutionary War veteran, was buried there in 1838.

Another hero of the Revolution interred there is Leavitt Millard.

Cemetery Superintendent Kevin Bowman and his team — Andrew Gurekovich, Ryan Boland, John Jurewicz and Mike Bontempo — have been digging deep into the ground to reset the stones. They glued and clamped broken ones and treated them with a "biological cleaning agent."

The crew then scrubbed those markers.

The results have been nothing short of amazing.

Here's a before image from 2022 ...

And now during the work in 2025 ...

"Kevin and his colleagues do a great job maintaining our cemeteries," Vernon Mayor Dan Champagne said. "His team's grant-funded work at Southwest Cemetery this fall has truly been spectacular. The stones are straight and bright and the cemetery just looks great. The people buried at Southwest Cemetery left us a long time ago and we continue to carry through with our responsibility to properly maintain their final resting places."

Bowman said the work, performed after his department’s regular working hours per the requirements of the grant, has been rewarding. His small staff is always busy maintaining five cemeteries and handling a steady flow of interments.

"Cemeteries are historic places, peaceful places and it’s been enjoyable performing the work and getting to see how much better the cemetery looks now," Bowman said. "We are grateful to the state for awarding us this grant to do this work."

And it's noticeable.

"People seem to really appreciate what we’ve been able to do and how the cemetery now looks," Bowman said. "People take pride in our town, and in its history."

Although the work Bowman and his team has completed so far has had a dramatic impact on the cemetery’s appearance, more work is to be done. Bowman and his staff plan to continue working this fall as long as possible, then resume work in the spring.

If nothing supernatural, the cemetery has had its share of unnatural events.

Take Nov. 30, 2020, for example. At about 7 p.m. that day, a black, 1999 Toyota 4Runner driven by a 42-year-old Manchester woman was heading toward Rockville in the right lane on Route 83.

The Toyota veered off the pavement, sprung up a grassy knoll, plowed over a protective stone and crashed into a 1750s grave between 240 and 255 feet into the cemetery, according to a Vernon Police Department crash report.

The names on the 1751 marker are David and Mary Forbes, who were originally from East Hartford. How they wound up with a Vernon cemetery as their final resting place is not clear, official have said, but police determined the driver arrived there because of prescription pill intoxication, according to the crash report.

Vernon officials had a restoration company repair the Forbes stone.

Now, the Cemetery staff is completing the work on the other markers.