- Details
- Category: Past Issues
Gravestone
carvers workshop
set for Oct. 22
POMFRET — The Cemetery Corporation for the South Sabin Cemetery in Pomfret will be presenting a one-day workshop on the gravestone carvers in one of Pomfret’s earliest burial grounds.
The workshop is made possible through a grant from the Connecticut Humanities.
The program, Written in Stone, will be from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Oct. 22. The workshop and tour will be led by gravestone carver scholars, Keegan Day and Ruth Shapleigh Brown, and local historian, Donna Dufresne.
The Written in Stone workshop is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is recommended: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Keegan Day will lead the tour of gravestone carvers, explain the funerary art, symbology, spiritual evolution of the carvings from the austere Puritan era to the Age of Enlightenment, the geology of the stones and geographic connections to other parts of New England. Ruth Shapleigh Brown will tutor those interested in preserving early gravestones in cleaning techniques and reading and interpreting written data, while Donna Dufresne will highlight social history derived from the epitaphs and vital data recorded on the stones. The grant is also funding a 21st-century tool: “Written in Stone: The Virtual Tour “ of the South/Sabin Cemetery. It's accessible by QR codes.
The Written in Stone website is being developed by Janet Booth of Brooklyn. Visitors will be able to access extensive information about individual burials, gravestone carvers, genealogy, and primary sources through an interactive map. The virtual tour will be ideal for researchers, educators and those interested in local history.
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