Melanie Lust ’19
Fundraising efforts to restore the severely vandalized grave of school founder Horace Staples are now underway, spearheaded by Jeanne Stevens of the social studies department.
The damage affected the tombstones of Horace Staples’ first and second wives, his son, his daughter and an obelisk bearing the family name. Every family tombstone located in the Greens Farms Lower Cemetery near the Sherwood Island area was broken in half in an act of vandalism.
“We’re going to try to raise the money as soon as we can,” Stevens said. Repairing all graves will cost $10,000, according to Artista Studios and Monument Works, a restoration company in Bridgeport. On May 30, Stevens sent an email to the school asking for donations to a fund set up by Mari Carroll, Secretary for Purchasing and Student Activities at Staples.
Stevens first became aware of the graves’ conditions last January while conducting research for Founder’s Day, a celebration of Horace Staples and his contributions to Staples High School and the Westport community.
“As I was looking around and trying to piece together [the research], I came across these pictures,” she said, referring to an image of Staples’ wife’s crumbling tombstone. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, hopefully it doesn’t look like that.’ So I went there, and was just shocked at what a terrible state it’s in, for somebody who was the town’s philanthropist.”
Strewn along the freshly dug earth, where restorers have already begun their search for each piece of every tombstone, are fragments of the Staples family graves. Next to a leaning obelisk lies a piece engraved with the word “Horace,” directly beside a grave reading “Marye” (Staples’ second wife) that seems to have been cracked directly in half.
Peter Jennings, Greens Farms Church Historian and longest-serving board member of the Westport Historical Society, says every graveyard deals with vandalism at some point. Many other graves in the cemetery currently need to be righted and fixed as part of continual maintenance procedures. Jennings is working on organizing volunteers to assist with this in late June.
“We’re planning [a] cemetery ‘Work Day ‘ jointly by Greens Farms Church and the Westport Historical Society,” Jennings said. “I’ll give a short talk about the history of Westport Cemeteries, and the GFC lower one, and then a workshop on headstone repair before beginning.”
As of now, the church board of the cemetery has approved Stevens’ request for Artista to begin restoration, and the project will commence as soon as money is raised.
“They have to be put back together by professionals,” Stevens said. “There are people in the state, really all over, that do professional historic tombstone repairs, and Artista is well-known in this whole area and [has] repaired many historic sites.”
Next, the graves undergo a series of transformations: shipping, cleaning, drying, gluing, and more—a costly process that students like Peter Clanton ’18 believe to be worth it.
“I think that it is imperative to preserve Horace Staples’ grave,” Clanton said. “He founded Staples High School, which gave Westport residents a high quality public education program in a time where public education and quality often did not correlate. It is our duty to honor his gift to the community by preserving his grave.”
Stevens agreed, adding that it is crucial not to let local history fade. Ultimately, restoring the gravesite is a project of love for her, and she is willing to overcome most obstacles.
“This is somebody who was really important to our town,” she said. It’s important that we not just honor them by fixing up this situation, but also to connect ourselves with the past.”
