Story by Bill Nagler | Photograph by Jack McConnell

Fall is the time for leafy walks off the well-trodden path, and with Halloween approaching, what better place to stroll than in one of Farmington Valley’s scenic cemeteries? On quiet byways, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on your town’s past and meet more than a few notables, whose gravestones ensure that their names live on in local history.

In graveyards in Simsbury, Granby and Farmington, you’ll meet colonists, veterans of the Revolutionary War, an unrepentant Tory, an African from the Amistad revolt, a U.S. senator and governors, a survivor of the Titanic, confidantes of presidents, a Broadway playwright, an actor famous for his Sherlock Holmes, and many more, plus a ghost or two.

As you arrive in your car at one of the area’s most magnificent burial grounds, the Simsbury Cemetery on Hopmeadow Street in the center of town, you can look up toward one of the mausoleums on the crest of the hill and thank the man who made your drive a safe one. William P. Eno, dubbed the “Father of Traffic Safety,” proposed rules of the road for the newfangled automobile more than 100 years ago.

Eno, who died in 1945 at age 86, lies in the grandest of five mausoleums built for the family of Amos R. Eno, a Simsbury native who once was the largest landowner in Manhattan. In 1900, William Eno stated in The Rider and Driver magazine that “the first important principle of the rules of the road is that vehicles shall keep to the right.” A graduate of Yale (and member of Skull & Bones), Eno is also credited with helping to invent the stop sign, one-way streets and the ubiquitous traffic cop. Oddly enough, Eno, though he established the Eno Transportation Foundation in Washington, D.C., never learned to drive — a chauffeur took him everywhere.

To view Eno’s mausoleum with its imposing classical columns, enter through the ornate main gate by the street and follow the center lane lined by manicured arborvitae to the top of the hill. Another Eno mausoleum, on the right, contains the remains of a survivor of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic , Hokan B. Steffanson. He was traveling from Sweden when the ship went down, according to Jackson Eno, a cousin who has presided over the Simsbury Cemetery Association for 33 years. The sinking — tragic for so many — had an especially happy ending for Steffanson: He met his future wife, Mary Pinchot Eno, at a Titanic survivors’ party.

Farther to the right on the crest of the hill is the intricately carved granite marker of one of Simsbury’s major public figures — George P. McLean, governor, U.S. senator, donor of the McLean Game Refuge and fishing buddy of President Calvin Coolidge. Jackson Eno, whose father, Ralph Eno, was McLean’s nephew, recounts an amusing tale from one of Coolidge’s angling trips to Simsbury. Hoping to bring Ralph along, McLean and the president went to the local school, only to be told that the boy was sick at home. They looked for him there, but he couldn’t be found, Eno says. “My father always liked to say that Calvin Coolidge caught him skipping school.”

About a quarter way down the cemetery’s central lane from the top of the hill, on the north side, one can view memorials of the triumph and tragedy of the town’s most prominent manufacturer, the Ensign-Bickford Company, which revolutionized the mining business in the mid-19th century by patenting fuses for detonating explosives more safely. The Toy family, which helped found the firm, is remembered with a massive granite monument. Sharing space next to it, though, is a tall, brownstone shaft marking the graves of eight young women who were on the manufacturing line in 1859 when black powder exploded, in what is believed to be the company’s greatest single loss of life.

Descending the hill, one travels further back into history, and the gravestones become smaller and more weather-beaten. Marble disappears, to be replaced by brownstone. On the south side at the bottom, a tombstone with a Revolutionary War marker denotes Simsbury’s greatest hero of the war, Noah Phelps. His bold — some might say reckless — exploits led to one of the Americans’ early victories, the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and its British garrison in 1775 without a shot being fired.

It was Phelps, a captain in the militia, who was dispatched by Col. Ethan Allen and his “Green Mountain Boys” to spy on the defenses of the fortress controlling the lower reaches of Lake Champlain. Exhibiting remarkable sangfroid, Phelps entered the fort on the pretext of getting a shave, then paid a visit to the commanding officer, who gave him a tour of the dilapidated ramparts and conceded that even the powder was wet, according to historian Samuel B. Griffin, in his book The War for American Independence. Fortified with that intelligence, Allen called on the fort to surrender, and the British obliged.

Phelps, who rose to become a major general in the militia, died in 1809 at age 67. “A patriot of ’76 to such we are indebted for our national independence,” reads the inscription on his stone.

Granby’s most prominent burying ground is Center Cemetery, a sun-baked field opposite whizzing traffic on Route 189, just north of the center of town. The older part of the cemetery is the southern half, and a small brownstone marker in back is perhaps the best known. It marks the grave of Daniel Hays, who was kidnapped by Indians in 1707 at age 21. In Canada, he ran the gantlet between lines of warriors waving war clubs and saved himself by darting into a tepee, where an old woman claimed him as her new son and slave, recounts Carol Laun of the town’s Salmon Brook Historical Society.

Seven years passed before Hays was able to buy his freedom and return to town, where he raised a family and lived until age 70. Historians can be grateful: “Had he been killed, it would have changed history, because he was a direct ancestor of President Rutherford B. Hayes,” Laun says.

Early parishioners might have wished that the Rev. Isaac Porter had been captured instead. As minister of the town’s First Congregational Church from 1794 to 1832, the stern moralist ruled with an iron hand and always delivered the same sermon — on the doctrine of predestination, Laun says. Worse still, he delivered it in a monotone. Finally, the long-suffering congregation rebelled and persuaded Porter to leave with a year’s pay. Apparently the parishioners later regretted their action, Laun surmises, because the stone they erected near the front of the cemetery reads: “Whether enjoying the confidence and affection of his people himself as their Pastor or seeing them bestowed upon others, he remained the same peaceful peace-making meek, humble holy man of GOD.”

A stern view of life and death, like that espoused by Granby’s minister, suffuses the earliest rows of Farmington’s first cemetery, Memento Mori, or “Remember Death,” on Main Street. The graveyard with its trademark Egyptian gateway is chock-full of weathered brownstone markers displaying stark visages from Puritan days. “It really reflects how people thought about life,” says Lisa Johnson, executive director of the town’s Stanley-Whitman House, which manages the grounds. “These stones early on were meant to frighten people into a proper view.” Later, as we move farther back into the cemetery and into the 19th century, that bleak view eases and the skeletal faces on the tombs become angels’ faces.

One of the more poignant tales in the cemetery is told by a simple stone in front, near the right-hand corner. It marks the grave of a 1-year-old slave, the only one in the cemetery, lying in what Johnson suspects is the slave owners’ family plot. How the boy happened to be buried there, no one knows.

About six rows back, near the left side, is a curiosity — the tomb of Matthias Leaming, a Tory, or British “loyalist,” who fled to Canada during the American Revolution. When Leaming and his family returned, they were ostracized, and he died alone and poor, Johnson says. To mark his isolation, he was buried with his stone facing away from the street — in the opposite direction from the others. His inscription reads: “In memory of Mr. Matthias Leaming — Who hars gott Beyond the Reach of Parcecusion — The life of man is Vanity.”

Near the center of the cemetery lies the grave of Captain Judah Woodruff, who designed and built the town’s celebrated Congregational Church and 21 other buildings between 1763 and 1798 that still stand today — many of them classic colonial mansions on Main Street. “In some ways I think he really defined the appearance of Farmington,” Johnson says. And yet this consummate craftsman also was the consummate “cranky Yankee,” Johnson observed. During the Revolutionary War, he ran afoul of his superior officers; on returning home, he questioned the church’s authority and ended up being excommunicated before dying in 1799.

Memento Mori has its famous citizens, too. A plain stone near that of Woodruff’s marks the grave of Connecticut’s fourth governor, John Treadwell, who also served in the Continental Congress and helped ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Memento Mori is just the sort of graveyard that brings ghosts to mind, and a story involving a mysterious spirit is recounted in the 1906 volume Farmington, Connecticut: The Village of Beautiful Homes. In the early 1800s, Ebenezer Mix, a sea captain, was living in the house on the south side of the cemetery. It seems an apparition had been seen several times there, so Mix was not surprised one night to look out his bedroom window and see a tall form clothed in white, waving its two great arms. He screamed at it to depart, but it only waved all the more. Finally he took up a loaded musket and blazed away. The next morning at the base of one of the tall white tombstones lay his quarry — the remains of Deacon Elijah Porter’s old white goose.

For the superstitious, the story has a prequel — and a sequel. In an earlier house on the same site lived Mary Barnes, one of the last three people to be hanged for witchcraft in Connecticut, in 1662. And, to bring the reader up to date, Mix’s house — a magnificent colonial that was one of the glories of Main Street — was nearly consumed by fire in July.

Perhaps the most visited grave in Farmington is at its other burying ground, Riverside Cemetery, a mix of sun and shade on Garden Street overlooking a bend in the Farmington River. To the left of the center lane, a granite tomb and brass plaque mark the grave of Foone, one of the Mendi Africans who revolted aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1839 and won their freedom in a U.S. Supreme Court case two years later. Foone and others from the tribe were staying in Farmington until they could return home when, in 1841, he drowned in the Farmington Canal. Historians debate whether Foone took his own life out of despair of ever reaching home again, or whether his death was a simple accident.

During the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the last century, few people were said to be more influential than his older sister, Anna Roosevelt Cowles, who had married into one of Farmington’s first families and lived in “Oldgate” mansion on Main Street. The president who famously made it his policy to “speak softly and carry a big stick” rarely made major decisions without consulting his beloved, yet strong-minded, “Bamie,” who is buried with her husband, Admiral William Sheffield Cowles, at Riverside.

Roosevelt frequently traveled to visit his sister, including at least one time as president, on Oct. 22, 1901. On that day the hyper-active Roosevelt took in a carriage ride, lunch with U.S. senators, a town reception, inspection of an oak planted on the town green in memory of his slain predecessor, William McKinley, and a hike up Rattlesnake Mountain. It was not the only presidential connection for Anna Roosevelt Cowles, who died in 1931 at age 76 — she also mentored a niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, the future first lady.

Stage and screen have their place at Riverside. Long before Basil Rathbone took on the role, William Gillette was celebrated as an inimitable Sherlock Holmes. The man who gave the state the baroque Gillette Castle lies beneath a simple stone next to his wife, Helen, in the Gillette family plot just to the right of the center road, about a third of the way in. He died in 1937.

Another actor — and a Broadway playwright — buried at Riverside from the same era is Winchell Smith. In the role of movie producer, he persuaded the great early American director D.W. Griffith to set scenes of his silent film classic Way Down East , with Lillian Gish, in town on the Farmington River near the Grist Mill. Smith, who wrote the screenplay, depicts Gish apparently doomed on an ice floe heading toward a waterfall before she is rescued. The 1920 Way Down East , the fourth-highest grossing silent movie of all time, was not Smith’s only hit. His 1918 play Lightnin’ set a record for the longest run in American theatrical history, with 1,291 performances.

Smith, who built one of Farmington’s most valuable pieces of real estate, the ornate Millstream Manor next to the cemetery, died in 1933. His bronze likeness, shown encircled by a garland, marks his tomb by the river.

Riverside, too, has its ghostly connections, or at least enough of an aura to make some people wonder. Architect Theodate Pope Riddle, who died in 1946 and whose home is now the Hill-Stead Museum, is buried there. Riddle, a fervent believer in spiritualism, held séances at her home, and even now some sense her presence around the house, according to Richard Bremkamp, marketing director for the Farmington Inn. Likewise, some say Sarah Porter, the founder of Miss Porter’s School, who also is buried at Riverside, has been seen wandering about her institution, keeping an eye on things.

The two women helped inspire Bremkamp to weave the tale of The Gray Lady , a fictional account of a bereaved young woman, Letticia Fallon, who is said in the story to be buried at Riverside Cemetery. A girl at Miss Porter’s sees Letticia’s ghost, which is “young and radiant in a beautiful white wedding gown.” The pamphlet, issued to those staying at the inn, is realistic enough so guests ask whether it is true, Bremkamp says. “People will believe what they want to believe.”

In the Farmington Valley’s historic old cemeteries, belief comes easily: belief in the long-lasting influence of so many extraordinary people who helped make our towns what they are today.

The Stanley-Whitman House has scheduled a noon-hour talk and tour at Memento Mori for Wednesday, Oct. 14. Cost is $2 for members, $3 for non-members.

Bill Nagler is a freelance writer living in Farmington.