New England Oddities

This Week’s Best Photos

Below is a selection of our best photos taken over the past week. Right-click to open full size. Beneath the photos you will find links to our full Flickr sets for these locations.

The Smith monument at Quabbin Park Cemetery. Quabbin Park is a very large, scenic park-style cemetery in Ware, MA, and is the new home of many of the grave sites that had to be moved when the Quabbin Reservoir was commissioned.

Stone detail at Quabbin Park Cemetery.

The grass and trees are slowly reclaiming this road along Quabbin Gate 40, formerly the town of Dana, MA. This town was disincorporated and abandoned in 1938 to make way for the reservoir. Today, only cellar holes and an extensive network of stone walls remain.

One of the cellar holes at the former Dana town common.

Pine trees stand in spiky guard over these slate stones at Dean Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg, MA. Dean Hill, the new site of the former Revolutionary Cemetery, still has a long way to come in terms of preservation and renovation, as this photo shows.

A carving on a slate headstone at South Street Cemetery in Fitchburg, MA. South Street, the oldest cemetery in Fitchburg, is an anachronism tucked away amongst houses and industry in the midst of the city.

The grave site of Warren Gibbs at Knight’s Cemetery in Pelham, MA, known popularly as the “oyster grave” or the “arsenic grave”. The stone reads as follows:

Warren Gibbs
died by arsenic poison
March 23. 1860.
Æ 36 yrs, 5 mos.
23 days

Think my friends when this you see
How my wife hath done by me
She in some oysters did prepare
Some poison for my lot and share;

When of the same I did partake
And nature yielded to its fate
Before she my wife became
Mary Felton was her name.

Erected by his brother
Wm. Gibbs

An unidentified burial mound at an unidentified cemetery on Packardville Road in Pelham, MA. I guess we’ve got some research to do!

This week’s full photo sets on Flickr:
Quabbin Park Cemetery – Ware, MA.
Abandoned Dana, MA (now part of Petersham) at Quabbin Gate 40.
Dean Hill Cemetery – Fitchburg, MA.
South Street Cemetery – Fitchburg, MA
Harkness Cemetery – Pelham, MA.
Knight’s Cemetery – Pelham, MA.
Unidentified cemetery on Packardville Road in Pelham, MA.