by Sandra Hamer
It’s official – the term “community service” is alive and well with Stephentown Boy Scouts. Thanks to TJ Mullen and members of West Sand Lake Boy Scout Troop #525, the Stephentown Center Baptist Cemetery on Calvin Cole Road has been cleared of an estimated 20 years of trees, weeds, brush and undergrowth.
TJ Mullen Is Directing The Project To Earn Eagle Scout Badge
TJ Mullen, an East Nassau resident and senior at Averill Park High School, chose to clean up the Stephentown cemetery for his Eagle Scout project. “I have always been interested in history,” TJ explained, “and this cemetery project just appealed to me and seemed appropriate.” To prepare for the task, TJ and his father Tim traveled to Grafton for a day long seminar on cemetery preservation hosted by the Grafton Historical Society. TJ said, “There I learned that the most important thing is to do no damage in your efforts to clean up and restore things in the cemetery.”
TJ recruited fellow Boy Scouts, many of whom are Stephentown residents, friends and parents to help with the clean up work. Armed with rakes, saws and tarps, the group went to work the weekends of October 10 and 17 sawing down trees and shrubs, dragging away tarps loaded with debris and uncovering fallen gravestones that have nearly disappeared into the earth.
Helping TJ with the clean up project was his brother Sean and his parents Jim and Mary Beth from East Nassau. In addition, Stephentown residents Chris Muller and William and John DeFreest and their parents John and Phyllis and Scout Master Jim Farrington, his wife Dinah and son Matthew helped. Help also came from Averill Park’s Tom Boyd and Evan Moore, Brunswick’s Andy White and West Sand Lake’s Matthew Bentley.
Scout Master Jim Farrington explained that the members of his troop had previously worked on a clean up project with other Boy Scout troops on an island in the Hudson River. “Initially, we hauled out two dump trucks of debris,” Farrington said, “but after a couple of years it was so clean that the guys were fighting for little scraps of paper. This cemetery clean up is a really meaningful community service project for them right here in Stephentown.”
Once the debris clean up is finished, TJ Mullen plans to use his newly learned gravestone cleaning skills to remove years of dirt, moss and lichen from a few of the gravestones to demonstrate how much better they will look once restored.
“We are so grateful to TJ Mullen and the members of Boy Scout Troop #525,” said Patricia Flint, President of the Stephentown Historical Society. “We have nearly 80 cemeteries in Stephentown, and most of them are badly neglected. A few are maintained by formal cemetery associations, and a few have been ‘adopted’ and are cared for by individuals or organizations. The Presbyterian Hill Cemetery, for example, is weeded at least annually by the Men’s Club of the Stephentown Federated Church. Without their help, that cemetery and a vital part of Stephentown’s history would disappear forever.”
“Over the spring and summer months, our Stephentown Historical Society members have been surveying most of the Town’s old cemeteries in an effort to determine the status of each cemetery and the extent of work that needs to be done to preserve them,” Flint continued. “From the surveys that have already been turned in, we know that some are in deplorable shape. There is much work ahead, and we’ll need the labor, ideas and resources of civic minded individuals and organizations to accomplish the tasks. Anyone or any organization who wants to join us in this effort to save our cemeteries may call me at 733-5871 or Sandy Hamer at 733-0196. We still have a few surveys to be done,” she concluded, “and plenty of cemeteries that need weeding and pruning.”