WXBC. Over 225 years, the name of the property has changed, but the view of the Catskills has not, and neither has its essential purpose as place of respite and reflection. Many on campus are surprised to learn of Manor’s former life as a progressive retirement home. Likewise, few know of the cemetery that is only a short walk from parking lots at the north edge of campus. This was certainly true in the early 2000s, when Richard Griffiths, then director of Bard’s Physical Plant, received a letter from a gentleman in California who was looking for his mother’s grave. The son knew his mother had resided at Ward Manor and assumed she was buried on campus since Bard owned the mansion. Not knowing anything about a Ward Manor cemetery, Griffiths consulted Randy Clum, director of Bard’s Buildings and Grounds. Although Clum was equally perplexed, Tivoli resident and B-and-G employee Arty Lemon pointed the two directors to a small cemetery in the southern section of Tivoli Bays. When the brush and undergrowth that had taken over this small hidden site was cleared, most of the revealed graves were sunken and the plaques that marked each resting place had been covered by several inches of dirt and, in some instances, networks of tree roots. Griffiths documented the names on about 80 of the grave markers, and before his death in 2006 he asked Clum and James Brudvig, vice president for finance and administration, to continue to look after the cemetery. In the summer of 2016, Clum and his crew cleared the area again after gaining permission from the DEC to maintain the site. He contacted the New York State Historic Preservation Office to list the cemetery in its Cultural Resource Information System. In partnership with Bard Archivist Helene Tieger ’85, the project to document the cemetery began in earnest. Tieger and Emily Majer ’95 went to Columbia University to visit the archives of the Community Service Society (CSS), which subsumed the AICP in 1939. There they found, among other documents, individual dossiers on Ward Manor residents the CSS made in 1958 as it considered selling the estate. The records detail the lives of residents, noting their histories, health, and possibilities for future relocation. Students transcribed these records and checked the names against the list of those whose grave markers Griffiths had documented. Over the summer the documentation team worked to uncover the buried grave markers, with the expectation that Griffiths’s list was fairly complete. It was a surprise, then, when volunteer Joe Zenovic, Red Hook resident and subterranean sleuth, brought his metal detector to the site and flagged 177 markers across nine rows. Students searched census records and obituaries to begin building a database of those buried in the cemetery, using Griffiths’s list, the CSS archives, and the markers as they were uncovered. In fall 2016, Susan Fox Rogers, visiting associate professor of writing, and Gretta Tritch Roman, coordinator of the Digital History Lab, joined the efforts to continue uncovering markers and researching the people buried there. Working for the lab, Anne Comer ’19, Qingxuan “Helen” Han ’19, and Shane Ciancanelli ’18 assisted in revealing and documenting the markers. Comer, as the lead student lab assistant, continued
researching and adding to the database through the school year as names were uncovered. With the Digital History Lab, the documentation project has expanded in scope to use the research and database to create a public website. The central feature of this website will be an interactive map of the Ward Manor cemetery that will mark the individual graves and include the stories of those buried there. The aim of this project is not only to record their names but also to bring their pasts into our present. The website for the documentation project currently lists only the phases of the work, yet it was enough to attract an inquiry. A woman from New York City had been searching for the resting place of her great-grandfather, Herman Stocker. Her mother, 98, told her that she remembered he had gone someplace upstate after his daughter could no longer care for him. She believed it was Ward Manor, but did not know. The mystery was solved at last: Stocker’s name was on Griffiths’s list, and the students had already completed research that included his obituary from 1941. When Stocker’s marker is uncovered, his great-granddaughter will be invited to visit his grave. As the documentation team continues work on the project, other stories of Ward Manor’s history have also emerged to help enrich the narrative of this utopian community. Long-term residents of Red Hook remember Ward Manor as a retirement home and summer camp, and frequently mention their memories of visiting the estate, especially in the summer months to go swimming in the large community pool. In a series of oral history interviews, the team is recording these memories, including those of William Matthews’s granddaughter, who lives in Tivoli, to populate other portions of the interactive map. Additionally, William Matthews wrote about Ward Manor in his memoir, Adventures in Giving (1939), and in his book about Manor House. Excerpts from these recollections as well as historic photographs will also be added to the map to animate this largely forgotten landscape. Providing this public face to the project may help descendants find the final resting place of their loved ones, but it also invites in other audiences, both familiar with and new to Ward Manor’s longer story. The cemetery, as a site of memory, unifies the numerous histories of the people who have lived on this estate, bridging generations and life events from childhood to twilight years. Their stories likewise point to a history of selflessness and civility as a realistic vision. Performing the research has brought Bard students into conversation with that past as well as with local residents who remember it. Ward Manor is, once again, a site of communion for people who may have never interacted with one another were it not for this landscape—a landscape that has inspired a new generation of “soldiers for the common good.”
Emily Majer ’95 is assistant to the Red Hook historian and a Historic Red Hook trustee; Gretta Tritch Roman is digital projects coordinator for Experimental Humanities and coordinator of the Digital History Lab.
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