Spring has risen in a field of forever winter. Jennie O. Cheney, 152 years removed from the cold drizzle of a pale sky, rests deep beneath a blanket of rust-colored pine needles. Tears fell here once – how could they not? – but now mourning belongs to the stone marker alone:
And has her gentle spirit fled
To realms of peace on high
And is she numbered with the dead
She seemed to (sic) pure to die
* * *
Like many New Hampshire towns, Bradford seems content to deceive through-travelers by way of modesty. It’s a beautiful piece of earth rendered almost ordinary by routes 103 and 114 on its eastern side, which is the only part some ever see. But travel across the Bement Covered Bridge and down Center Road toward the Meetinghouse, and a spell is cast. Here is New Hampshire almost precisely as it once was – the kind of place that makes you long for a time that was never yours.
This melding of history and hurry, the latter perhaps unavoidable in a town that bills itself as the “Gateway to the Lake Sunapee Region,” provides the stage dressing of Union Cemetery.
* * *
Jennie was born in Bradford on May 6, 1850, the second child and only daughter of Daniel and Mehitable Cheney. When she was 12, her father enlisted with the 16th New Hampshire Infantry to serve in the Union Army and returned home, disabled, less than a year later. Twenty days after Jennie’s 14th birthday, and 7½ months after his 45th, Daniel Cheney was dead.
He never met his fourth child, Dannie, a boy who took his first breath 46 days after his father took his last.
* * *
Union Cemetery is shaped like a thimble and rises gently from Route 103, between Compassion Veterinary Hospital and Blaisdell Pond Road. A white corral fence lines the southern edge facing the road, and visitors park on a grassy turnaround not big enough to hold more than four or five cars at a time.
On this midweek day, traffic is light but consistent. Nobody stops at the cemetery, or even slows down. Why would they?
***
The Cheney family plot, on the left side of the slope, is framed by rough stone coping that’s in the process of being reclaimed by soft earth. Jennie’s is the middle of three markers and the one most broken by time or tempest. The gravestone, perhaps chosen by the widow Mehitable, must have been a stunning white on the day it was placed.
How she must have grieved on that mid-September day. For 17 years, four months and nine days Mehitable J. Cheney was the mother of a living daughter, and then just like that she wasn’t.
* * *
Old cemeteries dot the landscape of New Hampshire, and rare is the community that doesn’t treasure them. Bradford is no exception. But for those without a genetic or emotional connection to an engraved name, there is little reason to visit Union Cemetery. It’s too small for a nice walk and holds none of the qualities of quaint New England. There are no famous tombs or breathtaking sights, only moss-covered verses and names.
This is just another place you pass on the way to somewhere else.
* * *
Dannie was 3 when Jennie died. The boy, fatherless from day one, would carry only a toddler’s memory of his big sister, if he remembered her at all. He was a child born into tragedy and reared beside it. And it never let him be.
Eleven years and eleven months – that’s how long Dannie spent among the living before taking his permanent place alongside Jennie in Union Cemetery. His stone reads:
Heaven containeth now our treasure
Earth the lovely
Casket keeps
And our footsteps
Love to linger
Where our darling
Dannie sleeps.
* * *
Union Cemetery was the place on 103 where you could turn around if you overshot the vet’s. It’s still that. It will never be just that again.
* * *
Mehitable Cheney died in 1879 at age 55 on what would have been Dannie’s 15th birthday, and for 140 years she has shared a headstone with her husband in Union Cemetery. Their other two sons survived well into adulthood. Charles died at 51 in 1897 and George Henry at 81 in 1937. Both were buried in New Hampshire – George Henry at nearby Sunny Plain – but neither in the family plot at Union.
It’s likely the why is buried with them.
* * *
Spring has risen in Bradford, and the Warner River rushes with vigor along Route 103 and beneath the Bement Covered Bridge. Follow the river east for a mile and a half or so, and you’ll come to a small, thimble-shaped field sloping upward to the north.
It’s not much to look at maybe, but there are voices and stories there. If you go, whisper to Dannie and Jennie that they are mourned still.