Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, for the Times Argus
BARRE — For the past four months, Scott McLaughlin, executive director of the Vermont Granite Museum, and 16 employees have been sorting through the tens of thousands of records of the city’s cemeteries to create a comprehensive digital map. Once complete on July 1, the map will show the name, date and precise GPS location of every grave in Hope, Elmwood and St. Monica cemeteries.
The data will be available on the city’s website. Visitors will be able to download the CemSites app, which can direct them to any grave in the cemetery.
“It’s going to be making finding a loved one’s resting place much, much easier,” said Tom Baker, the city’s director of cemeteries.
Hope Cemetery, located off Vermont Route 14, is the largest and most famous of the three burial grounds. World renowned for its unique headstones, the cemetery spans more than 73 acres and has more than 9,700 monuments. Elmwood, a 21-acre tract in the city’s east end and a popular sledding spot in winter, was founded in 1850, making it Barre’s oldest cemetery. St. Monica, on Beckley Street, is the smallest of the three, with 14 acres and close to 1,900 headstones. All told, the three cemeteries span nearly 109 acres and contain 16,024 memorials.
In the absence of a publicly available map, locals visiting a loved one’s grave often end up as impromptu cemetery tour guides, helping tourists locate notable headstones, said Starr Lecompte, chair of the city’s Cemetery Committee.
Once the map is published, “you won’t need to ask anybody,” Lecompte said. “You’ll be able to do it yourself.”
Ilene Gillander, the cemetery committee secretary, said visitors would expect an easier system when visiting such a notable landmark.
“This is really bringing us up into 2026,” she said.
The project began with sorting and digitizing thousands of mouse-eaten files, including full-size sketches and maps of plantings and monuments. Some of the documents date back to Elmwood’s creation in 1850. The files filled the cemetery office, a little brick building across the street from Hope Cemetery.
From there, the granite museum team compiled the data into spreadsheets. Eventually, the data will be sent to CemSites, a cemetery management company that will put the information into a database and finish processing it for the public.
The process was made a little easier by the careful work of Arthur Perry, the superintendent of cemeteries in the 1950s.
“Arthur took a scientific approach to both the development of the cemeteries and the plantings and its management,” McLaughlin said. He was “highly organized and wanted to make sure everything was documented from the time someone had an interaction with someone who was going to purchase a potential lot in the cemeteries, right through to the final burial of individuals in the lot.”
A portion of the project was funded with contributions from the late Eugene Cozzi, who left the city a portion of his multimillion-dollar estate when he died in October 2024, directing most of the funds to improvements at Hope Cemetery. A former longtime state employee, Cozzi grew up in Barre and attended Spaulding High School. His monument in Hope Cemetery is a replica of his childhood home.
“He must have saved everything that he made,” Gillander said. “He wanted to prove that a boy coming from absolutely nowhere would make something of himself.”
The rest of the project is funded through the cemetery budget.
McLaughlin has further ambitions for the project.
“We could eventually get permission to use things such as photographs of individuals. We could add obituaries. We could add more details about the individuals that are buried there,” he said. “So there’s an opportunity for expansion. It becomes a more interesting resource for family members, community members, educators, people that want to do research.”
McLaughlin said he hopes the project will promote bus and walking tours in Hope Cemetery, which could be expanded to include all three cemeteries.
Further down the line, the city’s Cemetery Committee hopes to create a visitor’s center and a new fountain in Cozzi’s honor.
But for now, Lecompte is just glad the cemeteries finally have the money they need. “Since Mr. Cozzi was so generous with the city and the cemetery, we’re in a good position to be able to do some of the rehabilitation that we’ve needed to do for a long time,” she said. “It’s great news, really.”