Baby Winchester Monument To Rise Again

Annie Winchester, granddaughter of the founder of the eponymous New Haven firearms company, died in 1866 at ten days old from the withering Marasmus disease. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery beneath a sculpted marble cross braided with ivy.

Today the marble braided cross is missing. A visitor from Canada has started a campaign to replace it.

Annie’s monument went missing from the cemetery, a victim of theft or vandalism, since at least 2015.

The cemetery was aware of the situation. But it took Sarah Harvey, a visitor from far-away Calgary, Alberta, Canada, obsessed with the Winchester family and especially Annie and her mom, Sarah Winchester, to help launch the campaign to replace the marble braided cross.

This Thursday the board of the historic and still active (350 burials a year) cemetery plans to vote on plans to replace the monument and have an unveiling later in the summer or the fall, said General Manager Dale Fiore.

The replacement of the original marble cross will cost about $2,000. The cemetery association has committed $250 and recently raised another $900 from its insurance broker towards the total, Fiore reported.

The balance — such is the plan — will come from people contributing to the crowdsourced campaign organized by Sarah Harvey.

Fiore said he had previously been aware of the theft, ​“but I was hopeful this cross would show up” — perhaps found somewhere in the expansive cemetery or by the police — and be returned. ​“That’s my 30 years’ experience,” he added.

Sarah Harvey didn’t know that in the fall of 2015 when she traveled to New York and, since New Haven was close by, absolutely had to journey to our burg to visit the sites of all the known homes of the Winchester family. She stopped at the family’s burial plot in Evergreen.

“I’m a local historian, working on historic sites in Calgary,” and before that in San Jose, California, Harvey reported in a phone interview from Canada.

She had lived in San Jose previously, for 20 years, which is the site of the Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester had that house built after she traveled there in 1881 following the death, and burial beside Annie, of her husband William, company founder Oliver Winchester’s son.

Depressed by the loss of her only child and her husband and riven with guilt about the deaths wrought by those innumerable Winchester firearms distributed around the world, Sarah became a renowned philanthropist. She also kept building room after room and staircases and hallways — some apparently going absolutely nowhere — in a mansion that has now become a tourist destination. According to legend, the Mystery House is haunted in all its 161 rooms by the spirits of those killed by Winchester fire arms.

“Something about that family just captured me,” Harvey said. The result was doing research on the Winchester family for the last 15 years.

Her research revealed that the first item in Sarah’s will was $3,000 — roughly $41,000 in today’s money — set aside for care of the grave in New Haven.

So Harvey was upset to find that while Sarah and William’s small markers fronting the large family monument hewn out of an impressive block of granite were in OK shape, Annie’s cross was gone.

If anyone had paid for perpetual care, it would have been the Winchesters. Harvey made it her business to find out.

At her request Fiore checked the cemetery’s records and could find no mention of the ​“perpetual care” requirement for the grave. In fact, while the historic cemetery, founded in 1848, has lots of intact records from the early decades, he could find nothing on the Winchesters.

In any event, he explained during a recent tour of the site, when a family like the Winchesters or anyone buys a plot, a portion of the purchase goes to perpetual care.

But such care applies only to the grounds, the grass, the flowers.

The family is responsible for the markers and monuments, he said. After all the decades and a check of the records, Fiore said, he could find no Winchester relative contact info. So he was pleased with Harvey’s enthusiasm.

Because the Winchester monuments are in the cemetery’s historic section — the location includes the graves of such other 19th century notables like Edward Bouchet, the first African-American Yale PhD, Civil War surgeon and Oxford English Dictionary genius William Chester Minor, reputed hamburger inventor Louis Lassen —Fiore said the cemetery will get behind a replacement campaign.

The Winchester site along Highland Avenue is part of historic tours organized with the New Haven Museum and other groups, Fiore said. While he doesn’t want to set a precedent obliging the cemetery to replace every historic loss, the Winchesters are different. ​“I feel we have an obligation [to the community] to replace it,” he said.

That’s why he mentioned the project to Brown and Brown, the broker for the cemetery’s insurance, and $900 was recently donated.

That leaves approximately another $1,000.

The replacement would not only be of the marble cross, but of its base. The funds might also make possible improvements to the urn urging ​“Remember” at the corner of the plot as well.

“There’s plenty to do to boost the aesthetics; we’ll give it extra attention,” Fiore said.

He said there’s always a possibility the original may turn up as well. Because of the Winchester Mystery House, and all the attention that it gets, Fiore reported that at least once or twice every year trinkets or tokens or notes of love and regard have been left at the site, in front of Annie’s monument.

Harvey had a second reason for caring about Annie’s monument in addition to her fascination with the Winchester family: ​“I have a baby sister who died when I was a little girl. I think Sarah’s baby lived ten days. She couldn’t digest food. My baby sister died at three months, of pneumonia. My sister’s grave, I know it’s in good shape,” she said.

Those interested in contributing toward the campaign can go the GoFundMe site or reach Fiore directly at Evergreen Cemetery.