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Date: 4/28/2021
WESTFIELD – The Westfield Historical Commission met April 19 to discuss an ongoing grave mapping project and to consider whether to move the lone one-room schoolhouse on Montgomery Road.
Historical Commission Chair Cindy Gaylord said during the meeting that she is still in talks to have the Wyben Schoolhouse moved to downtown Westfield next to the Whip Museum.
She also said moving it from its current location will take away from its rural look, but she acknowledged that the current location for the schoolhouse is too inaccessible for school buses to bring students on field trips. She and the Historical Commission are still exploring all options to keep the building where it is.
“You lose the rural look of a rural schoolhouse if you move it downtown,” said Gaylord, “But it is much more visible downtown, and the river walk would be a much better historic destination.”
Commission member Cynthia Bronson said having the schoolhouse downtown would be like Westfield having “Our own little Storrowton Village.”
The commission also heard from Bruce Cortis, who is undertaking a grave mapping project of Westfield’s Old Burying Ground on Mechanic Street. Cortis is trying to document every grave in the cemetery going back to the 17th century. It is common that older headstones deteriorate or go missing over time, especially in a cemetery that is several centuries old.
Cortis said he is about 70 to 80 percent done with the project. When he is finished, every gravestone at the Old Burying Ground will be searchable in a PDF document, which would be useful for anybody who is trying to map out one’s genealogy.
Cortis said there are a few prominent graves that he is especially keen to locate.
“I want to go after the Taylor stone, the Fowler stone, and some of the other more prominent ones to get the GPS coordinates,” said Cortis.
He said he plans on doing a methodical probing of the cemetery grounds to find some of the lost graves. He also wants to look into the Westfield Athenaeum to acquire a group of pictures of the cemetery from the early 20th century and a journal from the Howland family. The Howlands had mapped out the entire cemetery in the late 19th century.
Cortis said of the graves depicted in the journal and the pictures no longer exist. Seeing them would allow him to map some of the graves that were visible in that time period but have since been lost.
The Historical Commission also voted unanimously to consider certain monuments in Westfield to be historically significant to the city. Veteran’s Graves Officer Gene H. Theroux said he wants to undertake some repairs and restoration of monuments such as the Gen. Shepard and Civil War statues on the Park Square Green.
“He has learned how to repair these stones so he is saving the city a lot of money, but some of the larger ones he can’t do on his own,” said Gaylord.
In order to acquire Community Preservation Act funding for the repair projects, the monuments needed to be considered historically significant. On April 21, two days after the Historical Commission vote, the Community Preservation Committee (CPC) voted unanimously to fund Theroux’s project to repair the Gen. Shepard statue, the Civil War statue, and the Grand Army of the Republic monument in Pine Hill Cemetery, as well as other smaller monuments. The CPC approved $128,500 in funding for the repairs.