Let Sleeping War of 1812 Vets Lie

New England is dotted with odd little side-of-the-road cemeteries and small middle-of-nowhere family burial plots.

One such Vermont burial ground, surrounded by an oh-so-New-England-white-picket-fence, is in the middle of some prime property that was purchased not long ago by a Wall Streeter.

While the mini-cemetery was not precisely located where J. Michel Guite plans to build his dream house, it apparently lies too close for comfort and - according to a Boston Globe article - "Guite was concerned that the cemetery would trouble his children when they played in the tall-grass fields."

Well, maybe the Guite children are hyper-sensitive, but I'm guessing that most kids - even if they were kind of weirded or icked out by the presence of a creepy old cemetery - would get plenty of ghost story/fairy tale goose-pimple pleasure out of it. Older kids could scare younger kids; younger kids would become older kids and scare the next passel of younger kids; the Guite children would grow up, and their kids would be scaring each other. ("Run, run, it's the ghost of Noah Aldrich...")

Noah Aldrich, a War of 1812 veteran - and there couldn't have been all that many of these - has been lying in his grave since 1848, where he's kept company by two young granddaughters who died in a flu epidemic, by his wife Lydia, and by the cremains of a family who owned the property in the twentieth century.

So, in addition to affording children to scare each other, having the cemetery around could provide a good old-fashioned learning experience about the War of 1812. About flu epidemics. About life in the old days being nasty, brutish, and short. About life and death.

But life belongs to the living, and the property belongs to J. Michel Guite, so he's free to do what he wants with it, even though he's got the town of Hartland, Vermont, up in arms about it. The judge who rules in the case,

...Joanne Ertel, noted that she had little choice but to permit the move because of a restrictive Vermont law. She went on to say: "Despite the fervent and far-reaching opposition to his plans, Mr. Guite has persisted in his quest. The court finds it difficult to fathom his persistence in the face of such widespread and heartfelt opposition. It's hard to imagine introducing yourself to a community with an action that the community finds abhorrent."

With the law on his side, Guite is now free to go ahead and move the graves to, in his words, "'a more peaceful place, far from the house and barn'" that Guite is putting up.

Well, dead is dead, and I'm pretty certain that the dead don't give a hoot and holler about where they end up. But the living care about where the dead end up, and the folks of Hartland don't want this small piece of their history disturbed.

Too bad for the folks in Hartland that some long-lost descendant of Noah and Lydia Aldrich stepped into the fray.

With the help of the Hartland Historical Society, Coloradan Marcia Neal had been tracing her roots. When they discovered the connection, the Historical Society enlisted Neal's help in opposing Guite. Originally, she was with them, but over time changed her view.  Her Western, property-rightish self- why should Guite have to deal with the potential problem of having Aldrich descendants feel that they should have grave visitation privileges - got the better of any trace elements of Ye Olde Vermont history buffish-ness that may still be running through her veins.

She withdrew her opposition to Guite's moving the graves, which paved the way for the judgment

It does seem too bad that this small part of a town's history, culture, and identity has to give way to one man's wealth-stoked desire to have his own way.

And this incident is, of course, just another episode in the ongoing tension between Moonlight in Vermont Vermont, and Vermont as rich New York playground Vermont. This has been going on for years, and the drama will continue to play itself out, until all the old Vermonters are as dead and gone as Noah Aldrich, and the well to do have created the perfect paradise that their wealth allows them. No rusting old heaps in the side yard. No peeling paint on the farmhouse. No smell of cow dung on the boots of the old geezer in the country store.

Nothing particularly new about this, and nothing particularly Vermont about it, either. (Just ask the folks in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; or Nantucket; or Connemara Ireland.)

Just another little tale about how folks with means can always find their way

And, Vermont being Vermont, there's a glorious footnote to this one. The group that sold the land to Guite? None other than the Unified Buddhist Church of Vermont.

I'll go out on a sugar maple limb here and state that the Unified Buddhist Church of Vermont was not the church that Noah Aldrich and his granddaughters were buried out of.