Allan Appel Photo
William MacMullen outside the cemetery.
The new sign.
There’s a broad, sunny, rectangular field in a seldom visited corner of New Haven where kids inadvertently used to play baseball on the graves of the dead.
That’s because most of the nameless granite markers with metallic numbered plates have over the decades sunk invisibly beneath the soil.
The baseball games are now over at the Woodin Street Cemetery, the long closed overflow municipal burying ground for the city’s poor that sits between the Elm City Community’s Rockview family housing development and Woodin Road on the Hamden border.
A new stout fence, repurposed from a previous life at the old Dixwell Q House, and a new sign to restore dignity were installed. (The sign was promptly stolen, but a replacement is on the way.) More improvements are to come.
That work is a labor of reverence for the indigent dead of New Haven on the part of William MacMullen, who retired from city government in September as coordinator of facilities and capital projects.
Click here for a story of how MacMullen, in the course of completing another city job, discovered the cemetery and the 1,101 bodies that are buried them, some likely those of veterans.
A Navy veteran himself, a history buff, a collector of historical memorabilia, and a serious re-enactor, MacMullen was moved to action.
With money from a private trust fund that had been set up for the cemetery, MacMullen saw to it that solid fences were installed. Not only ball players but drivers were in the habit of using the welcoming field to pull over off Woodin Street, to check tires or do repairs.
Without the expenditure of city funds, MacMullen was also able to restore the gate, paint it and the fencing. He secured with a lock and a new roof a small brick building in the far corner of the property where bodies were prepared for burial.
He was also pleased that the fence now protecting the cemetery was “partly recycled from the old Q House site. Instead of junking it in a Dumpster, I kept it at the Armory until we were ready to start to work.”
He put the sign up on a Monday afternoon. Two days later he showed up to bolt it to the fence — and it was gone. MacMullen searched the grounds; couldn’t find it.
He plans to return to put up a new version of the sign. This time he plans to bolt to the existing posts, rather than the fence.
MacMullen himself donated the sign and all the labor to get these tasks done. He has done so in part in his retirement.
He was at pains to add that the city has not entirely ignored the cemetery over the decades. He said the Department of Parks, Recreation & Trees have done a creditable job of “keeping the grass cut and the place looking nice.”
Next up is trying to find funds to raise the small stone pads with the bronze discs with the grave numbers on them. MacMullen plans to create a second sign with the names and grave locations of all those interred and to lift up markers that have sunk into the ground. (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to donate or learn more about the project.)
“Ground-penetrating radar and a careful surface dig could locate them and have them re-set so they don’t sink again. I’ll keep trying to find the funds,” MacMullen said. He also plans to replace some of the missing lettering on the gate overhead.
To find out who is buried in a grave —- a few still visible have family-provided stones, but most do not— you can check a registry book, which MacMullen has also located.
Why is MacMullen drawn to this work?
“While we usually set aside a day like Memorial Day to do a remembrance, for those who died alone or with no family or friends to mourn them, it’s even sadder that their lives are totally forgotten, reduced to a number. This way at least people will know they once existed, had a life, and a death that must have impacted someone. To me this is a part of history,” he responded.
“History is important because it gives us reason to remember, and that is important ‘even unto these,’ as the epitaph says on the gate.”