A virtual plot twist for forsaken cemetery

Old burial ground reconstructed online

Rebecca Duda wants Dracut officials to reclaim the Claypit Cemetery (above). The town’s oldest burial ground, it lies in ruins behind a bowling alley.

Last year, when history teacher Rebecca Duda saw Dracut's Claypit Cemetery - or what remained of it - for the first time, she was stunned.

Behind the Brunswick Zone bowling alley and in the woods behind the site of an old drive-in movie theater in modern-day Lowell, Dracut's oldest cemetery was in ruins. Smashed headstones cluttered the area, and family plots once marked by stone pillars were hidden by overgrown brush and moss. To Duda, it was an ignominious sight to behold as she began her project to reclaim the long-overlooked burial ground.

The old cemetery is now restored - sort of.

Melding together history and technology, Duda and her team, consisting of several teaching peers and students, have built a website that interactively reconstructs the lost cemetery for visitors and provides details about the people buried there. The website - an ongoing project involving Duda, who teaches at Lakeview Junior High School in Dracut; fellow Lakeview teacher Catie Pelland; Kevin McGrath, a library media specialist at Newton North High School; and retired history teacher W. Dean Eastman - went live recently.

"The cyber cemetery is up, even though the actual cemetery is in total disrepair," Duda said.

When exploring the website, primaryresearch.org, visitors can click on the tombstones of those interred at Claypit and get information about the deceased, including dates of birth and death, occupation, and spouse's name. Two of Duda's former students, Emily Fox and Megan Fawcett, conducted a hefty portion of the research of those buried at Claypit.

Among the most prominent interred there are members of the Lew family. Revolutionary War soldier Barzillai Lew was one of the African-Americans in Dracut who, according to the project, assisted the Underground Railroad to help slaves escape to free states.

An artist's conception of what the cemetery looked like is also on the website. Family plots are organized in the diagram, and the individual headstones of family members buried in the plots can be viewed with the click of the mouse. At least 25 people were interred at Claypit, according to Duda. Nine family plots have been discovered so far.

According to Duda and her team, only one headstone is in good condition. That stone belongs, appropriately enough, to a stonecutter named Benjamin Day. The rest are in fragments.

"We would like to see it not only preserved, but sustained after the re-creation," Duda said of the cemetery. Public knowledge about the burial ground is of the utmost importance to the team, but making its work difficult is the issue of who actually owns the cemetery: Claypit lies in an area that was part of the town of Dracut when the burials took place, but the land was annexed to Lowell in 1874.

Duda said neither municipality maintains the cemetery because neither believes it owns it. Lowell city assessors say the cemetery still belongs to Dracut, while Dracut town officials argue that Lowell officials will say what they want because they do not want to maintain it.

Adding to the confusion is that there is no deed to the cemetery.

"I believe that we own it, even though there's no deed," Duda said, referring to Dracut. In the Lowell assessors database, she said, Dracut is listed as the cemetery's owner.

Following a newspaper report last summer in which John Metros, a Dracut cemetery commissioner, said Claypit was not Dracut's property, Duda and her team wrote a response arguing that because the site was used as a burial ground before the annexation of the area to Lowell and because several Dracut veterans are buried there, the town should acknowledge the cemetery as its own. The town maintains Hildreth Cemetery in present-day Lowell that was once part of Dracut.

"You can apply the same logic to Claypit," Duda said. "Everyone buried there has ties to Dracut and none to Lowell."

Duda last month wrote an article criticizing what she calls Dracut's failure to acknowledge and maintain the cemetery. In the absence of any action by Dracut, she urged Lowell to take responsibility and honor those veterans buried at Claypit. That article led to a meeting with Selectman James O'Loughlin.

"He asked what I hoped to see happen," Duda said. "I told him I hoped to see it cleaned up because it's a mess, restored because there's nothing there, but, most importantly, devise long-term plans to keep it clean."

O'Loughlin said he will meet with Dracut's cemetery department, Town Manager Dennis Piendak, and Lowell representatives regarding the cemetery.

"It is in complete disrepair," O'Loughlin said. "I would like to see some efforts to restore it." He said he envisions a commission formed, hopefully with local veterans groups on board.

"Having a veterans' gravesite being ignored is something we cannot do," he said. "That's my main focus right now. We somehow have to honor those graves."

If a committee were to be formed, Duda said, any effort to restore the cemetery probably would have to rely on donations and volunteers, because of town budget issues. Maintenance would be a problem because there are only two on staff at the Cemetery Department, who have to look after seven cemeteries in Dracut.

Considering the Claypit's condition, along with no government record of those interred there, O'Loughlin said he envisions the cemetery becoming a memorial site.

Duda and the research team are hoping that as word about the cemetery spreads because of their efforts and website, a town effort to reclaim the site will follow.

"I know there's a responsive chord out there," said Eastman, who helped to set up the website.

Several area residents have contacted the team since the launch, including veterans upset about the cemetery's neglect. With at least one local selectman endorsing the team's mission now, Duda is optimistic about getting townwide support to salvage the burial ground. "Almost everything about our website is to immortalize these people. Part of it is getting the word out that these people existed."