STRONG — Selectman Dick Worthley was concerned that the fence around the Village Cemetery was collapsed in places, creating an unsafe and unsightly boundary.

The town-owned cemetery, near the center of town, has been maintained by the municipality with money placed in a trust. The town’s original Cemetery Committee dissolved more than 30 years ago, but voters approved funds for significant improvements.

“We don’t want people thinking we don’t care about how our cemeteries look,” Worthley said. “It’s time to take care of these problems.”

He hired Bowdoinham stonemason Albert Stehle to repair many of the oldest stones throughout the summer. Dating from the early 1800s, burial sites of the area’s early settlers include Brackley, Burbank, Conant, Daggett and Hunter, and others who built and operated the town’s first wood products, dairies, canning and logging enterprises.

The Crosby family plot includes renowned outdoorswoman Cornelia Thurza Crosby. Internationally known as Fly Rod Crosby, she was the first licensed Maine guide, in 1897. Crosby was a woman who “worked tirelessly to promote the sporting life in Maine,” according to Crosby’s biographers, Julia Hunter and Earle Shettleworth Jr.

Worthley contracted with the Rumford-based Quality Fence Company, which also has done much of the fencing for area schools. Owner Mark McKenna and his son Drew drilled 87 post holes for 850 feet of fencing this month, finishing before the ground had frozen solid. McKenna said that although the cemetery job was smaller than the University of Maine at Farmington’s Prescott Field, the problems were more challenging.

The Village Cemetery, close to a nearby gravel pit, is on very rocky soil, and he and Drew faced an immediate challenge. They used a compressor-driven post driver, which forced the first metal post onto a rock. That made the top of the post “mushroom” onto the driver, and they had to disassemble the driver to detach the post and begin again. They were discouraged at first, he said.

“That was our very first post, and we had 86 more posts to go,” he said. “I thought we might never get done.”

Three days and 87 posts later, the Village Cemetery has a crisp, green fence and sturdy posts along a newly surveyed line. The old brush and discarded debris have been hauled away, and the plan includes the future installation of a 14-foot-wide access fence for the town’s maintenance vehicles.

Mark McKenna, left, owner of Rumford-based Quality Fence Company, works with his son Drew to install 87 new posts and 850 feet of fencing on two sides of the Strong Village Cemetery. The old fencing had deteriorated so completely that sections were lying on the ground, according to Selectman Dick Worthley. “It was time to make this  cemetery a place the townspeople can be proud of again,” he said.  Many of the oldest stones in the cemetery date back to more than 200 years ago and represent the resting places of many of the town’s first settlers. (Valerie Tucker photo)

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