When it comes to Boston’s Historic Burial Grounds the buck stops with Kelly Thomas.

As manager of the city’s Historic Burial Grounds Initiative, Thomas is responsible for preserving all of the city’s 16 cemeteries, including the Dorchester North Burying Ground, also known as the First Burying Ground of Dorchester. The 3.27 acre property is located at the corner of Columbia Road and Stoughton street in Uphams Corner.

Thomas’s efforts to preserve and restore the North Burying Ground were featured on Historic Boston Incorporated’s website last month. The cemetery has undergone three rounds of renovations since Thomas took her job in 2000.

The burial ground was consecrated in 1633 and is the final resting place of a few of Dorchester’s founders, as well as a couple of colonial governors, including William Stoughton, who was the Chief Justice during the Salem Witch Trials.

A 19th century colony’s mausoleum belonging to the Wood family was restored in 2001-2003. It had been nearly entombed by plant life and vandals. Currently the structure is stable and free of overgrowth. Between 2002 and 2004, conservation and masonry specialists were employed by the city to reset, restore and preserve several badly damaged headstones and one mound tomb.

The most recent project was the stabilization of a row of above-ground tombs that took place from 2011 to 2012. Funding for these projects comes from grants from the state and a $140,000 annual budget that is supplemented by a partnership with Boston Trolley Tours and their Ghosts and Graveyards tour, which earns about $80,000 annually for Thomas’s department.

Boston City Parks and Recreation Department workers handle normal upkeep and report severe damage to Thomas.

“Dorchester North Burying Ground is unique among the sites because it was an active burial site for four centuries,” said Thomas. “So in the site you can see four different centuries of funerary monumentation.”
Thomas is a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who came to Boston to earn a master’s degree in historic preservation studies at Boston University in 1997. Her efforts are fueled by her appreciation of the age and beauty of stone rather than the macabre nature of grave sites.

“Ever since I was child I collected them,” said Thomas. “I find it quite fascinating to consider that we construct monuments which we consider old after a couple hundred years out of material that is millions of years old.”

The high percentage of child deaths in the 17th and 18th centuries has become obvious to Thomas through her work.

“Twenty-five percent of all headstones in Boston belong to children 10 or younger,” said Thomas. “One large stone in Eliot Graveyard in Roxbury really moves me. It marks the resting place of four children who died within several years of each other and just beside them rests their mother who died shortly after her children. I just don’t know how they handled that type of loss.”

Thomas focuses on preservation rather than restoration of headstones.
“ I don’t pursue perfection with the headstones because I want to stretch my budget as far as I can,” said Thomas. “I’d rather stabilize 100 stones than completely and perfectly restore one. A successful conservation job on headstones means you can’t even see that anything was done; they just look old.”

Most of the headstones are made of slate, which naturally cleaves when water seeps into the cracks in the stone freezes, and expands. This is another reason full epitaph re-inscription would be impractical. Instead, “I just try to buy some time,” said Thomas. “I know eventually whatever repairs I make will fail.”

In spite of this knowledge Thomas plans to do further headstone preservation in Dorchester North Burying Ground in 2016.