Veterans buried in Ridgefield

For Memorial Day, we offer this list of nearly 700 veterans buried in Ridgefield cemeteries. The list is a work in progress, and by no means complete.

We visited every gravesite to confirm its existence and gather information and photos, all of which are online and available to the public on FindAGrave.com

This list represents three years of research, work that is continuing as we make our way through the various town cemeteries.

Cemeteries that have been completed include Mapleshade, Fairlawn, Scott’s (also called Ridgefield Cemetery), Titicus (also called Old Town Cemetery), Hurlbutt, and Seymour. St. Mary Cemetery is nearly complete, and work has also been done at Branchville Cemetery (the only cemetery with a military section).


The listings are based on information at the gravesite and/or information obtained from obituaries or town histories.

We welcome additions to this list at jackfsanders atsign gmail  dot  com

Here is the link to the cemetery list, which in turn has links to all the men and women listed.

Ash yellows

For folks with White Ash trees, early May can be a nail-biting time as they wait and wait for the leaves to appear.

Ashes are one of the last native trees to leaf out in the spring. Many are still not out yet.

But ash owners aware of the “ash yellows” are particularly anxious to see leaves in the hopes that this deadly disease has not struck their tree. The result could be a hulk costing many hundreds of dollars to remove.

Ash yellows is a protoplasma, a kind of parasitic bacteria possibly transmitted by beetles, that attacks ashes and can kill them as in as quickly as one year – an amazing feat, considering White Ash may be anywhere from 50 to 100 feet tall, with up to a five foot diameter trunk.

One sign of a diseased tree are “witches’ brooms,” spindly clusters of leaves amid limbs that are otherwise leafless (see picture)

No one knows for sure how it spreads or exactly how it works, and no one has a way of preventing ashes from catching it.

But by now, if your ash has avoided infection, at least leaf buds should be appearing. If not, better plan on calling a tree crew.

Save the wood, though – ash is great in the fireplace.

Scourge of Spring

Before modern paving, spring thaws and rains turned roads to thick soup. Mud caused far more transportation problems than snow, swallowing the narrow wheels of carts and carriages and slowing journeys to a crawl. It still does in rural Vermont and New Hampshire.

Our forefathers tried various ways to cope with these quagmires. Logs were buried in the mud; in many places, plank-topped highways were built. For a while, charcoal roads were popular – logs were laid along the surface, set afire, and covered with dirt so they burned slowly and turned into charcoal that lasted longer than wood. The surface dirt was removed, and the charcoal packed into place. In some towns quarried stone was laid, long side down, to create durable and dry Telford roads.

The simplest way to handle particularly muddy spots was to fill them with boulders. While years of reworking and repaving have removed most of these old mud rocks, you will still run across old roads in New England towns with boulders protruding through the pavement, pushed up by decades of frost. Odds are, these are not rocks left long ago by lazy road builders, but ones once hauled there to deal with the scourge of spring.