It may not have been fully evident last week, but months from now a restoration of the historic Hedges Parsons Cemetery in Springs will bear fruit. The tiny, leafy plot on Old Stone Highway, near the Springs General Store and the hamlet's public school, was given a careful renovation on July 8 and last Thursday by the Burying Ground Preservation Group, a nonprofit organization formed in 2018.
Joel Snodgrass, of the Preservation Group and of Steward Preservation Services, told visitors to the cemetery last week that the groups' work can include surveys, straightening, cleaning, "and in many cases, conservation repairs, which is what primarily is going on now." Headstones, he said, "were completely submerged in the ground, we took them back out. Stones were broken, we repaired them. Stones were misplaced, we're resetting them where they go. Stones had sunken, had fallen off their bases, had been improperly set." One, he added, had broken into pieces.
"We look at these stones as the records of these people," said the group's Zach Studenroth. It was only in the mid-1880s, he said, that town clerks began to keep vital records such as births and deaths. "Prior, everybody was sort of on their own. Oftentimes, we find these are the only records of someone. . . . One of our motivations for cleaning the stones, which is not a repair, nor an essential treatment, is it makes them much easier to read."
A trailer filled with "nothing but cemetery tools" was parked on the street, among them a massive tripod with which stones are lifted from the ground. The headstone for Seth Parsons, who died in 1792 at age 33, had sunken around one foot into the earth, for example. "We're trying to get them back to have some integrity," Mr. Snodgrass said of the stones, "so they can be read properly."
"His monument is brownstone, which was popular throughout the 18th and early 19th century," Mr. Studenroth said, "but then marble takes over," the softer stone having been discovered in large quantities in Vermont after the American Revolution.
Once stones had been properly placed last Thursday, final aesthetic treatments would be applied before cleaning. "The cleaning process will happen over time," Mr. Snodgrass said. "The materials that we use take some time for them to fully do their job." In six months to one year, "they will be substantially whiter," he said.
Stone schists support the picket fence that encloses the cemetery. "You see this on the East End in various spots, and in New England," Mr. Snodgrass said. "That is the post for these fences. On Shelter Island, there is another one — all that's left is the posts, not the wooden rails — and there's one in Cutchogue. Those thrifty Yankees figured it out: The posts were going to rot, so they would use stone. The wood pickets are obviously more recent, they've been replaced. This was a traditional use."
All but two of the headstones in the cemetery bear the Parsons family name. It is believed that the name arrived in East Hampton with Samuel Parsons and his three sons in 1648, said Hugh King, the town historian. "The most important person" interred at the Hedges Parsons Cemetery, he said, is David Dimon Parsons, "who had the General Store built. He built the store, according to research, in the summer of 1844."
The restoration effort follows the 2009 report issued by the East Hampton Town Nature Preserve Committee on the state of the town's cemeteries. Among its recommendations were to provide maintenance plans, preserve existing architectural details and fencing of sites with original elements, and to make abandoned cemeteries historical landmarks or town property.
The town has a line in its annual budget for cemetery maintenance, Councilman David Lys said on Monday. "Restoring some of these colonial cemeteries is a true preservation of our past," he said. "We, as citizens, as the government of the town, can't forget our history. This is one way we can do it."
Restoration of the Hedges Parsons Cemetery follows that of the Van Scoy Burying Grounds in East Hampton's Northwest Woods last year. There, the headstone of Isaac Van Scoy, a patriot in the American Revolution, was a focus of the project.
Beyond historic structures, "There's a lot of history we should preserve," Mr. Lys said, "final resting places included."
