More than 45,000 people have been buried at the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester since 1870, but not all of them have been memorialized in the same way when it comes to gravesites. In 2021, while walking her dog during the Covid lockdown, Joyce Linehan, whose back porch overlooks the cemetery, noticed the discrepancies.
“I was spending lots of time in the cemetery looking for some solitude and exercise and just happened to notice the first gravesite at one point, then noticed the second a few days later,” Linehan said of two simple, flat stones lettered with the inscriptions “The Home for Aged Women” and “Home for Aged Colored Women.”
“I’ve seen these called unmarked graves, which is not a good assessment of them because they are marked, they just don’t have individual names on them,” Linehan said. “It leads you to ask questions about who these women are and how they came to be there.”
Linehan took her curiosity to Robert “Bobby” MacEachern, who manages the cemetery. A third-generation Codman Square resident, MacEachern started his answer to The Reporter with a personal story: “I lost my mother when I was six years old, and my father had luckily picked Cedar Grove to bury her, so I’ve literally grown up in the cemetery throughout my life,” he said. “I used to ride my bike down here all the time as a kid, many times a week, and these particular graves always stood out to me because they are different from all the other ones in the cemetery, with the lack of names. For me, as a kid, I always found that very interesting.”
Early on, when he was a student at UMass Boston, MacEachern tried to research the grave markers and the institutions but he “really hit a wall” in the pre-Internet days.
He did learn that The Home for Aged Colored Women was founded in 1860 and offered shelter to elderly African American women in Boston. During its operations at various locations around Beacon Hill until 1944, the home arranged to bury some residents at Cedar Grove Cemetery.
Absent more detailed information, he felt, like Linehan, that each woman deserved to be memorialized individually, not just as an unnamed member of a group.
Cassidy McNeeley photos
They established an ad hoc committee and in collaboration with Dr. Karilyn Crockett, assistant professor of urban history at MIT, and her students, the team spent 14 weeks in early 2022 researching the names and stories of all 133 women whose remains lay under the flat stone markers.
“From that point forward, we’ve really fleshed out a lot of information, and we picked up a significant amount of data as we started growing the group and vision of how best to honor these women,” said MacEachern.
Last year, the group, now known as the Friends of Cedar Grove, partnered with the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail (BWHT) and with the help of a $50,000 Legacy Grant for Boston and undertook the arranging of a permanent memorial at the cemetery.
Then last March, Alexandria Russell joined the BWHT as the organization’s first executive director.
“Part of my coming onto the Heritage Trail was thinking about how we might manage this project long term,” said Russell, who established a steering committee that includes MacEachern and Linehan as well as archivists, artists, and other “voices from different perspectives, varying ages and stages of life and careers.”
Noted Russell: “It’s a really great group. We came together this summer and agreed to collaborate” in this work.
Things are unfolding in two phases. The first, funded by the Legacy Grant, is a temporary installation of flowers and a sidewalk story sticker, designed by Roxbury native and artist Ekua Holmes, that will be unveiled in the spring.
“Ekua Holmes is designing a unique marker that we can place here and around the city to let people know [about the project,]” said Russell while standing in the cemetery. “We are going to have a QR code on that sticker, and that’s going to generate lots of feedback and information from community members near and far about how we should proceed with the permanent memorial.”
The committee will continue to gather this information throughout next summer and then meet in the fall to determine next steps for a permanent marker that will complete the second phase of the project.
MacEachern said that it’s important not to limit what the memorial could become.
“At the bare minimum, my goal straight along has been some type of memorial or monument that has each individual woman’s name, age, and the year of death. That is a physical, tangible piece, but I also hope that this will become more of an educational piece to help these women’s stories connect history to the present.”
Some of the stories have already surfaced in a tangible way. Rita Steele, a lifelong Maryland resident, discovered that her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Sarah Smith, was buried at Cedar Grove.
“I am not a detective, but I’m pretty fierce as an unprofessional researcher,” Steele told The Reporter. “I had a lot of information from vital records and census records, and I was working on my fourth great-grandmother’s information. I just had her death certificate, and I began to get a little curious about additional relatives that she may have lived with when she passed away, so I did a reverse address search, and that led me to finding out that she lived at the Home for Aged Colored Women.”
After that, Steele learned about the research group in Dorchester and sent an e-mail to Linehan. She is now involved with the steering committee and hopes the memorial will over time bring other descendants into the conversation, too.
Steele learned that her fourth great-grandmother and her siblings had a direct connection to the Underground Railroad. She also found articles that showed they worked directly with Frederick Douglass and other famous abolitionists.
“I was jumping out of my skin with all of the information that I found,” said Steele. “Just their names and a location just doesn’t connect any dots for you. So, once I found out that there is an organization that was going to create a memorial for a group of women buried in this plot, and I knew that my great-grandmother was a part of it, it was just awesome.”
Last month, Steele and her mother traveled from Baltimore to Dorchester to see the gravesites for the very first time. It was an emotional and inspiring visit, she said.
“It just kind of adds more to the depth of history in Boston. I believe, with everything going on in the world – there seem to be repeating trends for things that have happened – with women trying to fight for their right to independence and stand on their own, it kind of shows that we’ve done this before,” she said.
“There were women who participated and contributed to other aspects of the city, and I just hope that it really enhances the existing history that’s already been told, and kind of adds to more research to be done.”
Russell says the best is yet to come.
“There is a reason why this is all coming up right now in this moment. There are many lessons for us to learn as a community from these women.”
She added, “We are accepting donations, we are writing grants, we are planning fundraisers, and all types of things because we really value this project and the women of this project.
“No matter how long it takes or what it takes, we are going to see it through. It would be a faster process if we had some substantial funding. We welcome that and some input as to how we might do that effectively.”
For more information, or to get involved in the project, visit bwht.org/explore/cedar-grove-cemetery-home-for-aged-coloured-women-gravesites
