Halloweek begins

...with a bang! Or at least a full Sunday of Halloween-themed adventure. Starting right after breakfast at noon, we headed east to the Old Burying Grounds of Norwichtown, CT, which features many headstones carved by my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle Obadiah Wheeler.



We have a book that lists many of the names on Wheeler-carved stones, so we walked around a bit until we saw some that looked like Obadiah's style, checked the names in the book, and we were off. Let the documentation commence!











There were also quite a few footstones, which you may or may not be familiar with, but were often paired with headstones.



Occasionally, they were about as large as the headstones as well.



There were other notable early CT carvers, this one I especially like, even though there are no decorative elements.



On a side note, be careful out there! Nerf™ bowhunting season has officially opened in Connecticut, anywhere and anyone is fair game.



Regular readers of this blog may recall our first excursion to see Mr. Wheeler's handiwork in person at Trumbull Cemetery, over in Lebanon, CT. This was a very satisfying experience, and after my acquisition of the article "The Colonial gravestone carvings of Obadiah Wheeler" (by James A. Slater & Ernest Caulfield, photographs by Daniel Farber) from the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings of 1974, we had a listing of locations, names on headstones, and a history of the Obadiahstyle.

The Norwichtown site was fantastic, but daylight was still very much on our side so we proceeded next to Windham Center, for another attempt at finding Wheeler stones. SUCCESS!













That's the end to part one of Halloweek Sunday. Coming tomorrow, part two, PUMPKINTOWN U.S.A. Seriously.