Tour the Oldest Cemetery in South Berwick
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The Old Berwick Historical Society will lead a guided tour entitled "Spirits of Old Fields Burying Ground: Legends and History," on Saturday, October 13 at 1:00 pm.  Led by Dr. Neill De Paoli and Wendy Pirsig, the event initiates a year-long series of programs commemorating the 300th anniversary of the old town of Berwick (comprising present-day Berwick, South Berwick and North Berwick) in 1713. (Continued below)

 

Old Fields Burying Ground is located near the corner of Vine and Brattle Streets. The cemetery tour will be held rain or shine, and will last approximately an hour.  It is open to the public and is free of charge.  Comfortable shoes are recommended.

South Berwick’s oldest community cemetery, dating to the 1600s, is part of the “Old Fields” area that was once the center of town.  A meetinghouse stood nearby, and many people earned their livelihood at sawmills on the Great Works River and shipyards on the Salmon Falls River.

Walking tour participants will visit the graves of early ministers including Rev. Jeremiah Wise, who was ordained in 1707.  The cemetery is also the resting place of the early colonist Hetty Goodwin, who was captured by the Indians and carried to Canada in 1689. Veterans’ graves include that of a Civil War brevet major, and a soldier of the American Revolution who lost a beloved daughter.  The tour will explore the changing styles of grave stones and of rituals of mourning.

“Of all the old spots in old Berwick, this cemetery is the place where the spirits of the earliest pioneers can perhaps be most strongly felt today,” said De Paoli, who has been leading an archaeology dig on a property nearby. “This shaded hillside, overlooking Leigh’s Mill Pond beyond the trees, is the burial place of many settlers, including very likely the Spencer, Goodwin and Chadbourne families.”

Mehitable “Hetty” Goodwin was the daughter of Salmon Falls mill owner Roger Plaisted, who had been killed with two sons in an Indian raid of 1675. After her marriage, she was captured with her baby in another raid. The famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather used her story in Boston to illustrate atrocities at the hands of the French and Indians, one of whom “violently snatch'd the babe out of its mother's arms, and before her face knock'd out its brains.” She managed to survive and was carried to Quebec and married to a Frenchman, with whom she had two children, but after five years was ransomed by the English and returned home.

“Hetty Goodwin's half-buried little headstone may still be seen in the Old Fields burying ground,” wrote Sarah Orne Jewett in 1894. “I never can look at it without a thrill of feeling, or pass the pleasant place where she lived without remembering that she knew that lovely view over hill and dale, up the river, and must often have dreamed and longed for the sound of the river falls, in the far country to which she was carried a lonely captive, in the northern wilderness of Canada.”

Following the cemetery tour, the historical society invites participants to visit its Counting House Museum at Main and Liberty Street.  The museum is open on Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 to 4:00 pm through the end of October.  Admission is free.

The historical society plans a series of monthly lectures, an exhibit, and other programs pertaining to the community’s history before the old town of Berwick divided into the three towns known today.  This tricentennial commemoration is supported by memberships and by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council.

The next event celebrating Berwick’s 300th anniversary will be Thursday evening, November 15, when De Paoli presents a lecture, “Old Berwick Under Siege: Life During the War Years, 1675-1730.”  This program begins at 7:30 pm at Berwick Academy. De Paoli will discuss the historical and archaeological impact the Anglo-Wabanaki conflict had on the makeup, layout, and dynamics of the Old Fields "neighborhood" in present-day South Berwick.

More information on the society's programs is available by calling (207) 384-0000.  Their website www.oldberwick.org includes write-ups on five South Berwick historic cemeteries and a database of over 7000 graves.

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