Nov 26, 2007
To earn Gold Award
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Girl Scout catalogs Beck Hill Cemetery
Although it is not as well known as the Eagle Scout award, the Girl Scout Gold Award may require just as much work, as John Jay High School senior Erica Pizzolato found out. Over the summer, to earn her award, Erica spent her time attempting to catalog and organize more than 275 gravestones at the Beck Hill Cemetery in Vista, across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel.
“I wanted to do something for the veterans in my area,” Erica told The Ledger. After looking around at potential projects, she connected with Town Historian Maureen Koehl, who mentored her during the project.
Beck Hill contains gravestones dating back to the late 1790s, continuing through to today. The section of the graveyard that Erica was organizing contained primarily graves from the 1800s, with veterans of just about every war America’s been involved in, up to and including World War II.
“This project will enable the town to declare Beck Hill Cemetary a Lewisboro Landmark,” said Ms. Koehl. “Erica worked very hard in the oldest part of the cemetery and did a creditable job of figuring out the very haphazard rows of headstones and footstones. I think we will have a much better idea of who is buried where.”
Over two months, Erica took nine or 10 volunteers, gathered through her membership in both the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts, to the cemetery. She organized the graves into a grid, meticulously plotting the location and identity of each grave. The level of interest in the project surprised her, however.
“I really became engrossed in what I was doing” Erica said. “The volunteers were really interested.”
Now that the hard work is done, Erica plans to go before the Town Board on Tuesday, Dec. 4, to ask that a landmark plaque go up at the cemetery.
Beck Hill Cemetery
The cemetery is important to Lewisboro town history because it has what may be the resting place of John Lewis, who paid $10,000 in 1840 so that the town, then named Salem, would be named after him. Erica said that the gravestone, although it named Mr. Lewis, could also be that of his mother.
Erica said she was surprised at the sense of family revealed in the graves.
“You’d find a husband, and his couple of wives,” she said, pointing out that men often remarried if their wives died young. The youngest of the cemetery’s inhabitants were only a couple of months old; the oldest, a woman who lived more than a century.
The cemetery also contains the graves of many of Lewisboro’s oldest families, now recognizable only by street names — the Meads, the Boutons, the Hoyts, the Keelers. One grave marks the final resting place of one Thomas Jefferson — not the famous one but merely someone who bore his name.
Girl Scout, Boy Scout
In addition to being a member of the Girl Scouts, Erica is the president of Boy Scout Venture Crew 2008, from which she gathered several of her volunteers.
“I like being outside,” she gave as her reason for joining the Venturers. “I like a lot of the outdoor stuff.”
© Copyright 2008 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers
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