Neglected cemetery is focus of restoration
By: David Dankwa
MONTGOMERY — Beyond a marshy meadow across the Rock Brook, above a wooded knoll at the former North Princeton Developmental Center, is an old cemetery simply referred to by the few who know of its existence as the upper cemetery.
It’s not your typical cemetery.
There are no benches or walkways. Not even fresh flowers to suggest a recent visit. It’s accessible only by foot or a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The names on the eroding stone and cast iron gravestones, hidden in the overgrown underbrush, are barely legible. Some stones have been pushed aside by the large trees that have burgeoned above the graves.
When the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics, founded in 1898, existed at the NPDC site, the upper cemetery was one of two cemeteries where patients without families or whose families lacked the means to provide for their interment were laid to rest.
“For all intent and purposes, most people with disabilities (were) institutionalized to keep them out of sight and out of mind,” said Dr. David Holmes, the president of the Princeton-based Eden Family Services. That fact and the condition of the obscure cemetery, he said, is a “double shame.”
Thus, Dr. Holmes and about 25 members of the Princeton Corridor and Montgomery Rocky Hill Rotary clubs spent Friday afternoon cleaning up the cemetery as part of a project they called “Forgotten in Life; Remembered in Death.”
The plan, Dr. Holmes said, is to turn the forgotten cemetery into a “final resting place that has dignity.”
Rotarian Peter Dawson, a local resident, said Friday that he has known about the cemetery since he was a kid. But it wasn’t until a trustee of Eden, Robert Clancy, brought the worsening condition to the clubs’ attention that the Rotary clubs decided do something about it. Mr. Clancy discovered the cemetery, literally in his backyard, Mr. Dawson said.
In addition to the clean-up, Dr. Holmes and Mr. Dawson decided to find out more about the epileptics buried there and restore their displaced stones.
“It’s the highest form of altruism,” Dr. Holmes said. “Doing something for those who can’t do anything back for you.”
The Township Master Plan indicates two cemeteries at NPDC. The lower cemetery, which is newer, is located west of Burnt Hill Road, near the intersection of Orchard Road. About 210 patients were buried in the lower cemetery between 1960 and 1990.
The graves there are in sections — Jewish, Christians and an “overflow,” said Eric Joice, vice president of the Epileptic Foundation of New Jersey.
Mr. Joice said once a year the foundation holds a cleanup day at the lower cemetery, the more accessible of the two.
Also in the past, the state Department of Corrections has often volunteered its prisoners to help clean up, he said.
The department declined to do the same at the upper cemetery because “they didn’t feel it was safe to have an officer out there alone with prisoners,” Mr. Joice said.
While the annual cleanup has helped to maintain the lower cemetery, conditions there continue to worsen from constant flooding.
The upper cemetery is located on the south side of Rock Brook and can now be reached by a footbridge that once served as the Burnt Hill Road bridge over Rock Brook. The Master Plan notes that between 1904 and 1960, 467 interments were made at this site.
Alice Smith, the last woman to be sterilized by the state, is one of those buried there, said Mr. Joice.
Back then, because of the belief that disabilities, such as epilepsy, are transferable through childbirth, women with disabilities were separated from the men, he said. Even though it was too late to save her child, Ms. Smith went tothe state Supreme Court to seek a ban on the sterilization of developmentally disabled women. The court ruled in her favor in 1913, Mr. Joice said.
Sadly, her story is perhaps the only one out of the hundreds of people buried in the two graveyards that can easily be researched.
“The records of the patients are not as carefully kept as we had hoped,” said Dr. Holmes, who said the next step is to find out who is buried where.
That can be done, he said, “now that the place is clean.”