/ Sep. 18, 2008 12:00am EDT

Workers carefully repair and preserve a damaged gravestone in the Old South Hollow Cemetery. (Provided) Martha 1 of 1

The South Hollow Cemetery, the oldest of two graveyards for Granville’s earliest hill farm settlers, is getting a facelift.

With contributions from neighbors, Granville’s cemetery commission and a $500 grant from the Vermont Old Cemetery Association (VOCA), 19 stones have been expertly repaired by John Clegg & Company, a specialist in stone repair, who has done work in 50 Vermont cemeteries and countless others in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Scrubbing with a stiff bristle brush and ammonia water over Lucy Thompson’s century-streaked gravestone, we deciphered, as the famous imperative to the living emerged:

"Pause and reflect as you pass by,

As you are now so once was I.

As I am now so you must be,

Prepare for death and follow me."

Lucy, who died in 1852 at age 24, was daughter of Hiram and Fanny Ford and sister to Civil War veteran James H. Ford of Vermont’s 11^th Regiment, who gave his life in Baltimore in 1864 at the age of 18. His toppled gravestone lies on moss slowly obliterating its information. Bob O’Brian, a member of the local American Legion Post #43, will investigate obtaining a new stone.

Stones that angled every which way, some broken in half by teen vandals heard one night laughing as their truck careened by, have now been set upright. They look better, but still need cleaning. One badly broken marker was not repairable, so Clegg put up a gleaming new marble monument whose virgin white shocks the eye.

We had a celebratory hot dog roast for all the interested neighbors August 23, inviting VOCA’s vice president Betty Bell and Charles Marchant, who gave a talk on stone cleaning.

Next year, we hope to undertake the second phase of the South Hollow Cemetery project: the remaining 18 stones. John Deere’s parents-in-law are buried here; he married a Lamb daughter and when she died, came back to the white house nearest the cemetery now owned by Kendall and Joan Landis’ family, to wed her sister. The Vintons, who built the red house on the other side of the cemetery, also married Lambs, and some of these in-laws followed Deere to Moline, Ill. to make small fortunes.

Maybe Granville will some day hold a "Hill Farm History Day" when the project is completed. The Lamb-Deere and Vinton homes still stand preserved, as does the cemetery with its historic iron fence, and the schoolhouse all attended from 1835 onward.

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