BETHEL – Riverside Cemetery on North Road is crumbling into the Androscoggin River, threatening the graves of those buried there, and deeply worrying a group of Bethel residents.
“It’s a very historic cemetery” going back to the 1780s, said Stan Howe, executive director of Bethel’s Historical Society. Buried at Riverside are veterans of every war going back to the Revolutionary War, he said, and the graves of veterans should be afforded special care and attention.
Flooding this spring consumed a swath of the cemetery nearly 100 feet long and 25 feet wide. The newly eroded embankment is dangerously close – about 17 feet – to many of Riverside’s graves.
The association recently hired Donald Murphy, an environmental specialist at Main-Land Development Consultants in Livermore Falls, to perform an assessment of the damage at Riverside and look into possible sources of funding. Murphy, a Bethel resident, said he has inquired about two federal grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Community Development Block Grant program’s Urgent Need Fund. But he said getting funding from those sources was contingent upon President Bush’s declaring a state of emergency in areas affected by the spring flooding – which could happen any day.
Murphy said two significant factors explained Riverside’s damage: The cemetery is “right on a part of the river where the current comes right at the embankment,” and the soil there was “less stable, looser, finer.”
“What makes this happen,” he said, “is the same reason that this land is so good for agriculture.”
To repair the damage, Murphy said, a stone retaining wall would have to be built to stabilize the Androscoggin’s embankment in the problem area.
“It’s not unusual for a project like this to cost $100,000,” he said.
Riverside consists of about 14 acres, on both sides of North Road, and several thousand people are buried there, according to Don Brooks, president of the board of directors of the Riverside Cemetery Association. Brooks, who has several relatives buried in Riverside, said “we still have the land to expand for at least 100 years.”
Howe said that Riverside is the biggest of the town’s 14 cemeteries, its “most populous,” and the only one with an active vault. Vaults are temporary storage locations for bodies during the winter months when the ground is frozen and exceedingly difficult to dig.
Howe said he is also interested in seeing Riverside protected because of the variety of historically significant people buried there. Perhaps the most famous, he said, was the writer Dorothy Clarke Wilson, who wrote the book that became the basis for the screenplay for Hollywood’s “The Ten Commandments.” But he said there is also William Rodgers Chapman, the founder of the defunct but formerly prestigious Maine Music Festival, not to mention the Civil War diarist John Mead Gould.
“Of any Maine soldier in the Civil War, he had the most extensive diaries,” Howe said.
Murphy said he will solicit bids for design and construction of the retaining wall in June. If the cemetery association receives the appropriate funding, he said, construction would take place in August or September, when the river is at its lowest.
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