NEWS

Volunteers clean up cemetery, honor 2 friends who spent decades tending site

By JOHN HOWELL
Posted 12/10/20

By JOHN HOWELL It wasn't easy work. The rain and wet snow from the night before was now ice and the leaves were frozen. But that didn't stop about 40 volunteers from fanning out with rakes, leaf blowers and their bare hands Sunday morning in the biggest

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NEWS

Volunteers clean up cemetery, honor 2 friends who spent decades tending site

Posted

It wasn’t easy work.

The rain and wet snow from the night before was now ice and the leaves were frozen.

But that didn’t stop about 40 volunteers from fanning out with rakes, leaf blowers and their bare hands Sunday morning in the biggest fall cleanup yet at Brayton Cemetery on Post Road overlooking Apponaug Cove. When they were finished, the more than six-acre cemetery was cleared of leaves, fallen branches and debris.

Yet there was more to the effort mounted by the Warwick Commission on Historical Cemeteries and the Apponaug and Arnold’s Neck Improvement Associations. The cleanup had a special meaning for Danny Hall. It was the perpetuation of a commitment his grandfather Bob Darigan and his friend Emmett Reinhardt made more than 30 years ago.

Without fanfare, and in fear the city might stop them, Darigan and Reinhardt adopted the cemetery that is not formally managed or cared for. They cleared it of branches and fallen trees, mowed the grass in the summer, and from a mound of clean fill they had delivered would fill the depressions of fallen graves. They were there when the Boy Scouts, village associations and other groups made the cemetery cleanup a project.

Since he was a child, his grandfather raised Danny. He never met his father.

“He taught me everything,” Danny said of his grandfather.

Danny knew of Darigan’s commitment to the cemetery that lived on after his friend died in 2003. Darigan didn’t forget the cemetery.

As Danny recalls, his grandfather’s favorite place was an oak near the embankment with a view of the Warwick City Hall clock tower, the village and the cove.

This past February, Darigan was hospitalized with respiratory problems. He died on Feb. 20 of what Danny now believes was COVID-19.

Danny thought there would be no better final resting place for the man who raised him than the cemetery he had watched over for so many years of his life. And he knew where Darigan would want to be – beneath the oak tree.

Danny made inquiries. He was told that wasn’t going to happen. There wasn’t a plot near the oak tree.

Danny turned to Pegee Malcolm, chair of the Warwick Historic Cemeteries Commission. Malcolm knew the history, as she often does.

For years, Fred Richardson ran the cemetery. Following his death, he daughters took over. But they were unfamiliar with its operations and, once all the money was gone, abandoned it and destroyed most of the records.

“I knew from volunteering with Bob at the cemetery that he really wanted to be buried there, so when Ed Murphy was asked to find a burial place, I was pretty sure that I knew a place where no one had been buried or had previously purchased. The cemetery commission wrote a letter of no objection, and Bob was laid to rest where he wanted to be,” Malcolm explained in an email.

Danny did more than bury his grandfather near the oak – he also created a memorial to the two friends who cared for the cemetery all those years. The memorial was a focal point Sunday. Darigan’s relatively newly placed headstone and the marker bearing his and Reinhardt’s names stood out from headstones, which as Malcolm points out include “descendants of the Budlong family who were kidnapped during the King Philip War, doctors, lawyers, a judge on the RI Supreme Court, mill workers, homemakers, veterans of every war since the Revolution, including over 200 Civil War soldiers, and just plain folk.”

Those folk are joined by Darigan, who watched and cared for their graves for so many years.

volunteers, cemetery

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