Memorial Day Ghost Walk planned for Hope Cemetery, May 31

May 28, 2021 | By Waterbury Roundabout

Hope Cemetery is the setting for the Waterbury Historical Society's Memorial Day Ghost Walk. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti.

The Waterbury Historical Society brings back its Memorial Day Cemetery Ghost Walk on Monday, May 31. 

The annual free event featuring stories and tales about figures from Waterbury’s past will start at 11 a.m. at Hope Cemetery, behind the Waterbury Congregational Church at 8 North Main Street.

It will start with a ceremony by the American Legion Post 59 Color Guard. The program includes remarks by Crossett Brook Middle School eighth grader Nate Conyers and a performance by Vermont folk singer and historian Linda Radtke.

This year’s walk will highlight “boundary-breaking” stories of several local citizens from the 19th and early 20th centuries including two Black residents, both freed slaves. 

Historical society members will take turns giving short talks highlighting Lorenzo Bryant, a freedman from the south who came to Waterbury with Lieutenant William H. Henry post-Civil War, married a local woman, and settled down in the house he built at 70 North Main Street; Charles Daggs, a freedman from Virginia who befriended Captain Charles Dillingham and was sent north to live with the Dillingham family in Waterbury; and Elizabeth Colley, a dedicated educator, long-time principal of the Green Mountain Seminary School, and prominent Vermont suffragist in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Attendees are invited to bring a chair. The event is scheduled rain or shine.  

For more info contact Jan Gendreau from the Historical Society at  jangendreau@gmail.com.