By Shannon Hicks

There is a new stone at Zoar Cemetery this week, but it has not been placed at a burial site. Instead, the large granite marker has taken up residence at the crest of the hill just to the left of the cemetery's entryway. It says "Zoar Cemetery 1767." The new monument joins many in one of the town's oldest burial grounds, surrounded by names both familiar — Conger, Glover, Taylor, and Tilson in the first row alone! — and unfamiliar. There are new stones from earlier this year and old stones so eroded by time that they are barely legible.

The newly installed stone was placed by cemetery sexton Jonathan S. Bond, Sr, and was meant to replace a wooden sign that was installed to the right of the driveway about ten years ago. The old sign was still in place last weekend, but has since been taken down.

"We've been thinking about [replacing the old sign] for a couple of years," Mr Bond, who is "pretty much the cemetery association's president at this point," said last week. "We've been talking about this for a number of years, but it's been a money issue. We can only spend the interest that comes off of our main investment. There are other priorities rather than replacing the sign."

Mr Bond said the majority of the work done at the Berkshire Road historic cemetery these days is mulching and tree work, "more pressing issues."

But last year a Sandy Hook resident — and the widow of the cemetery association's former president, James Osborne — dangled a financial carrot in front of the cemetery board. Betty Lou Osborne offered a sizable donation for the cemetery, but it came with a stipulation: at least part of that donation had to be put toward a new sign for the cemetery.

"Jim loved that cemetery," Mrs Osborne said of her late husband. When Jim Osborne died in 2003, he was interred in the cemetery among other familiar Newtown and Sandy Hook names — Beardsley, Beers, Curtis, Knapp, and Sherman among them. The cemetery is larger than it appears to those just driving by. The cars that speed along Route 34 do not notice that the narrow driveway leading up into the burial ground then turns to the left and continues for a few hundred feet, winding through a burial ground that dates back nearly 250 years.

There are modern headstones that lay flat, and others that are upright and even include carved images. One family's stone for a lost child is in the shape of a teddy bear.

The cemetery is still active. There is at least one plot so new that its permanent headstone has not yet arrived, but flowers and other tributes honor the man buried there. There are also many stones that are beginning to erode from time; almost everything from the mid-19th Century back is illegible.

The cemetery even tells history lessons. Evidence of the lack of segregation in Newtown during the 18th and 19th Centuries is seen in the fact that the family graves of former slave Cato Freedom were given a prominent place at the old entrance to Zoar Cemetery in an area surrounded by Yankee graves. Cato's gravestone may be badly eroded and its inscription barely readable, but it still tells a story.

"Jim used to walk down there every day," said Mrs Osborne. "He loved the association, and even its meetings. He had the best time at those meetings.

"That old sign looked terrible. I thought this [donation for the new sign] was something I could do."

Once the cemetery association had the funds available for the new sign, Ned Steinmetz from Brown's Monument Works in Stepney-Monroe was enlisted for help with the stone.

"They came to me and asked for some proposals, something rustic and rough looking, and something that wasn't going to break the bank," Mr Steinmetz said. "I put together a couple of designs for them to pick from, and they chose the one you see there today."

The stone is roughly rectangle in shape, with rough edging around the sides and a smooth surface with "Zoar Cemetery 1767 carved into the center of each side. The stone's shape is a little reminiscent of a northern New England shape.

"I once did a stone that was in the shape of Vermont, so maybe subconsciously that had something to do with it," he said. "They gave me some size parameters to work with and I came up with something that everyone felt was rustic, and in keeping with the cemetery.

Mr Steinmetz credits Mr Bond with coming up with the idea for the stone's look.

"It was his idea to come up with 'a rustic looking slab,' those were his words to me," said Mr Steinmetz. "That's where the idea for the upright slab came from."

The stonework itself began in late November or December, said Mr Steinmetz. It began as a two-person job, with Mr Steinmetz and Danny Denigris doing the rough splitting on the larger stone, eventually chipping down a larger piece of granite into the size that was used for the Sandy Hook project.

"All that rough splitting is done with one person holding a large chisel and another person holding the hammer," said Mr Steinmetz. "It's a two-man operation to rough it down to size. And then the engraving and finishing work was all done by me.

"Uncle Danny is 73 years old, and he's done this kind of work all his life," said Mr Steinmetz. "This was kind of a old school cutting operation; it was right back to the way things were done when he was a lot younger. He was thrilled to be a part of this."

Mr Steinmetz finished the engraving during the winter, but had to keep the finished piece at his establishment in Monroe until just a few weeks ago.

"It couldn't have been placed in the ground in the winter, the ground was much too hard," he said. "There's almost 20 inches of stone stuck into the ground, anchored into the foundation John provided. Anyone going down Route 25 during the last few months has seen in out front here."

John Bond and two other men, son John Jr and friend George Radovan, put the stone, which Mr Steinmetz estimates to weigh between 4,500 and 4,800 pounds, into its foundation last week.

"I'm very pleased with it," Mr Steinmetz admitted this week. "I haven't been out to look at it now that it's in the cemetery, but I have gotten a lot of nice phone calls from people who had driven past and saw it here and then saw it once it was placed at the cemetery. They tell me how nice it looks on that little hill there, how it seems to fit into that space."

Those callers are right. Whether drivers are traveling north or south on Berkshire Road, the new larger sign calls out a little sooner than the old wooden one did, but it never dominates the landscape. The new sign is made of Barre granite, from Barre, Vt.

"It's a native New England stone, which was important to them," said Mr Steinmetz. "In the days of getting things from India, China, overseas, they wanted something domestic, something made by American workers. Which it was — it was all made right here."

The sign will certainly be around for a long time. It will honor those who are already buried in Zoar Cemetery for decades to come, and certainly is a source of pride for those who helped design, finance, and create it.

"We were honored that Zoar Cemetery chose us to build something that's going to be out there for the next 200 years," said Ned Steinmetz. "For us it was a real privilege to make something that's going to go into a historic cemetery. That cemetery's been here since 1767, that predates our own country. To have our monument stand there for another 200 years is pretty exciting for us."