LEWISTON — The Garcelon Cemetery on Ferry Road, South Lewiston, has tales to tell – a flood that washed out graves and left a field of bobbing pumpkins, Huguenot settlers from Guernsey who pioneered the area more than two centuries ago, early settlers who wrested farms from a wilderness and helped found what is now a city.

The Androscoggin Historical Society will sponsor a tour of the cemetery at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22. If rain is forecast, the tour will be Sunday, Oct. 23.

Tour leaders will be Doug Hodgkin, a retired professor of political science at Bates College, who has written several books about local history, and David Garcelon, a retired land surveyor and civil engineer who is a descendant of the original settlers of Lewiston and has done extensive research into his family history. Both men have ancestors buried in the cemetery.

They will tell stories of the Garcelon family, of participants in the Civil War, the effects of the year without a summer and the solved mystery of a missing gravestone. They note that the cemetery is one of the earliest burying grounds of Lewiston and includes the graves of some of the earliest town leaders and other inhabitants of South Lewiston.

Hodgkin was a member of the Bates College faculty from 1966 to 2002, serving as chairman of the Political Science Department for 10 years. After retirement, he focused on local history and transcribed records published in two volumes titled “Town Records of Lewiston, Maine.” Other publications include “Lewiston Memories: A Bicentennial Pictorial,” “The Grange at Crowley’s Junction,” “Fractured Family: Fighting in the Maine Courts,” “The Baptists of Court Street, Auburn, Maine,” “The Lewiston & Auburn Railroad, 1872–2009,” and “Frontier to Industrial City: Lewiston Town Politics, 1770–1863.” Hodgkin has served as president, board member and, since 1990, as newsletter editor of the Androscoggin Historical Society.

Garcelon’s family came to America from France in the 1760s and was among the original settlers of Lewiston. He has spent 47 years as a land surveyor and civil engineer in the New England area. To date, he has donated more than 700 documents dating back to the mid-1700s to the Edmund Muskie Library and Archives at Bates College; to the Androscoggin Historical Society; and to the Lovell Historical Society.

Both men are members of the Androscoggin Historical Society’s board of directors.

The cemetery is located across from 286 Ferry Road.

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