GIRL SCOUT RESTORING FORT FAMILY CEMETERY
by Ian MacFarland

Revolutionary War veteran Major Abraham Fort's centuries-old farmhouse narrowly escaped the wrecking ball last month, when the Town of Poughkeepsie Historical Committee moved quickly to request historic designation for the site and prevent developers from leveling it. Now the Fort family's burial ground is being rescued from the clutches of neglect and decay as well.

Kelly Marsh, a senior at Spackenkill High School, is restoring the cemetery, located across Route 9 from the so-called Fort Homestead, as part of her bid for a Gold Award, the highest level of achievement for the Girl Scouts of America. The awards ceremony should be held near the end of June, she said.

"You're supposed to do something that benefits the community," Marsh said, noting that the body of Major Fort, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, lies in the 19th century cemetery among the overgrown weeds and broken, deteriorating headstones.

When she first started cleaning out the grounds, she said, "It was so overgrown you literally had to walk through saplings and weeds." She added, "There was a layer of leaves this thick," holding her fingers about two inches apart.

A self-described history buff, Marsh first discovered the cemetery as a young teenager. She would walk past it often on the way to the South Gate Deli, which lies between the cemetery and Route 9. Most likely the teenagers have adopted the Fort family ground as a drinking spot over the years followed a similar path - one of the major parts of the cleanup effort has been excavating decades-old bottles littered throughout the cemetery.

"I think we've found beer bottles from the Eighties," Marsh said. In one corner of the cemetery she has a collection of several dozen dirt-encrusted bottles, and when the first bags of garbage were hauled away, she said, they contained so much broken glass that they sounded like wind-chimes.

Councilman Stephan Krakower, whose ward contains the cemetery as well as the Fort Homestead, arranged for the town to remove 40 bags of garbage from the site free of charge. "It's pretty impressive," he said, "when someone from the community gives back to where they live like that."

The cemetery, which is enclosed by a waist-high stone wall, has been stripped down to the soil, with only a few residual weeds and shards of glass remaining. However, it is barely visible from the street and highly inaccessible; potential visitors must trudge up a hill, through a thicket of trees, and climb over the crumbling wall to enter. The entrance, which is completely blocked by a massive granite monument, stands at the top of the steepest face of the hill, overlooking the road.

Marsh plans to make the grounds more visible and accessible by clearing a path up the hill and installing steps to help traverse the wall. She also intends to plant flowers inside the wall to make the grounds more attractive. She will not be planting grass, however, "It would be hard to get a lawnmower in here," she said.

She is also working with Barre Memorials of Hyde Park and Hopewell Junction to restore the broken and misplaced grave markers, which lay in piles scattered throughout the grounds. Major Fort's barely legible stone is one of the only ones still standing in one piece.

Bernie Potrzeba, owner of Barre Memorials, noted that each year the company chooses an endangered Hudson Valley cemetery and donates their time and services to refurbish it as part of their Cemetery Restoration Program. "This year, " he said, "Kelly chose us."

The first step in refurbishing a cemetery, Potrzeba said, is to determine the chronological layout of the burial plots, which usually form a pattern beginning with the oldest stone. Then the misplaced stones must be matched with the plots they mark. If the stones are illegible, he added, they will do a rubbing of the face to try and uncover any markings that will help identify it, such as the date of birth or death.

According to Ginny Buechele, a historian, genealogist, and a member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the earliest known grave in the burial ground is that of Joseph Nelson, the son-in-law of Abraham Fort. However, she said, since the death dates and burial locations of Fort's parents are unknown, she suspects that they might be interred in the cemetery as well.

Marsh said that the most recent known burial was Susan Fort Granger in 1871. Sometime around 1920, she said, Abraham Fort's grandson C. Augustus Haviland installed the monument at the entrance, listing the names of everyone buried within.

Potrzeba said that the stones in the Fort Family Ground, which are made of very soft soapstone and limestone, are too fragile to be pressure-washed, so a gentler steam cleaning method with a light mixture of muriatic acid and bleached to restore their original white color.

Stones that are cracked or broken will be re-jointed if possible, Potrzeba added, and those that are leaning or tilting will have their foundations reinforced. Often gravestones lean when the ground shifts beneath them, he said, but because the Fort family ground sits atop a small knoll, this hasn't been much of a problem. "I think they're going to be fine," he said.

As reported in The Beat on May 21, the 250-year-old Fort family home, one of the oldest remaining structures in the Town of Poughkeepsie, was nearly demolished by the Ginsburg Development Corporation, which plans to transform the former Casperkill Country Club, which includes the Fort Homestead site, into a large residential complex. Chris Moss, an employee of the town Assessing Department, noticed the building was slated for destruction and notified Jean Murphy, the town Historian, beginning the process that eventually led to a stop work order on the house issued on May 19.

Ironically, Buechele said, Dutchess County's historical records show that Abraham Fort worked as an assessor himself in 1778.

Krakower said that the hearing on the house's bid for historic landmark status, originally scheduled for June 16, has been postponed to allow more time for the public to be properly notified. A new date will be sent [sic] at the next Town Board meeting, said Town Clerk Susan Miller. It will most likely be held the third week of July, she said.

The house "definitely should be preserved," Krakower said. "It would be a shame to wipe out that piece of local history with one swoop of heavy machinery."

During the Revolutionary War, Buechele said, Abraham Fort apparently served as a lieutenant under Colonel John Frear in the Dutchess County Militia, and was most likely promoted to the rank of major after the war ended.

Information about the Dutchess County 4th has proven very hard to come by, Buechele said. However, 200 members of the militia are buried in a cemetery in Quebec; Buechele believes that they fell victim to an outbreak of smallpox that decimated their ranks and curtailed their participation in the war. It is unclear how Fort survived the outbreak, she said. He may not have been present, or he may have had a natural immunity to the disease.

Many people don't even know the cemetery is there, Buechele noted, or that Fort's body lies there. "I think it's a great thing Kelly is doing," she said, adding that when we honor our country's veterans, "we shouldn't forget the Revolutionary War."