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Self-guided Revolutionary War Cemetery Tour debuts in Shaftsbury

Posted: May 28, 2025

SHAFTSBURY – A town employee has developed a self-guided tour of the graves in Center Cemetery of soldiers who served in the Revolutionary War.

“Jen (Holley), our cemetery superintendent did a really, really wonderful job on this project,” Town Administrator Paula Iken said at the May 19 Select Board meeting. “A lot of work went into this.”

The physical map for the tour is available at the town offices at Cole Hall. Each Revolutionary War veteran grave is numbered. The map has a QR code to provide information on a smart phone as one goes from grave to grave. There are 45 graves in all. “It will take you to information about each individual soldier that you can just scroll through,” Holley said.

Those who cannot visit the cemetery can still take the tour using a link on the town website.

In addition to being cemetery superintendent, Holley is town operations coordinator, assistant town clerk and web master. Previously, she digitized all of the town’s cemeteries, making it easy to search for a name and find a grave.

Speaking to the Banner on Tuesday, Holley said she got some slate tiles and put numbers on them with the help of assessor clerk Gina Jenks. Holley said she would put them out by the graves that afternoon. This is to help avoid confusion, as the cemetery contains graves of veterans of other wars, which have recently also been marked with U.S. flags.

“People can just see the number and walk towards them,” she said.

Holley said work on the project took about 10 to 12 hours. The Shaftsbury Historical Society gave her the information that she worked with to make accessible.

The first two stops on the tour are Captain Benjamin Dyer and Charles Dyer. Benjamin served in four companies during 1781 and 1782. Sgt. Charles Dyer served in Col. Samuel Herrick's regiment of militia in October 1780. He served 12 days and traveled 55 miles. Number 4, Samuel Slocum, served at the Battle of Bennington, on August 16, 1777.

Gravesite number 5 on the tour is Sgt. Isaiah Carpenter. Before his service in the Revolution, he was one of the leading participants, along with James Breakenridge, in the famed Breakenridge Stand-Off, which occurred in July 1771 when local farmers faced off against officials from New York who came to enforce rival land claims and evict those who had established farms in what is now the Bennington area.

A New York sheriff’s posse of about 300 from the then-British colony of New York was confronted by about 250 members of the emerging Green Mountain Boys militia at Henry Bridge. The stand-off ended without bloodshed but the New York group backed off from their objective. The event is credited with spurring settlers to begin imagining a separate entity that came to be called Vermont.

A monument erected in 1927 at the Breakenridge home site on Murphy Road commemorates the stand-off and calls the event the “Birthplace of Vermont.”

Number 8 on the tour, Ahimaaz Hebard (1759-1802) participated in the Revolutionary War from Connecticut and served under the Marquise De Lafayette. In addition to their historical significance, many of the graves feature the cemetery stone iconography of the era. These include symbols of mourning and classical motifs. Hebard's stone features what looks like an urn with flame. Many of the graves hold inscriptions, though they are difficult to read. The gravestone of Hebard has the epitaph: "His patience quelled his pain and fear/His virtue shone with brilliant hue/Without one murmuring word or tear/He bid terrestrial life adieu."

According to the website familysearch.org, his last name was actually Hibbard.

Holley and volunteers have done much work recently on the town’s cemeteries, including Center Cemetery. On Sunday, they cleaned all of the veterans’ headstones in the Village Cemetery. More such efforts on the headstones of veterans and others will continue in June, she said.

Download the Map

View the Desktop Tour.

Compliments of: The Bennington Banner
Posted/Author: Mark Rondeau

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