Overview

Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont, is one of New England's most renowned graveyards. This 85-acre open-air museum is noted for the artistry and craftsmanship of its monuments, derived exclusively from legendary Barre gray granite. The cemetery attracts thousands of visitors every year, particularly when the foliage turns during fall. Barre was a boomtown with a rapidly rising population of European immigrants, especially those from Italy and Scotland, seeking opportunities as artisan carvers and laborers in the area's granite quarries. Ethnic enclaves developed around Barre; most notably, the city's north end became known as Little Italy. This diversity is captured in granite on the monuments of those interred at Hope Cemetery--not only in the surnames etched in stone but also in the monuments' widely varying symbols of remembrance. Within Hope Cemetery, memorials range from traditional European forms, including angels, cherubs, and other religious hallmarks, to highly individualized modern monuments depicting images representative of family life, interests, and leisure in the form of such diverse objects as lounge chairs, airplanes, race cars, a soccer ball, and many more.

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9781467128476

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The monuments and stories of Hope Cemetery provide a precious window into the history of Barre. Beyond the intrinsic visual interest of the individual monuments and the record of evolving funerary tastes and idiosyncratic gestures that have made Hope a major tourist destination since the 1980s, there are insights into a complex and often poignant history that leave the reader wishing to pursue in greater depth the story of this distinctive community, the dominant industry that shaped it, and the people whom it drew to Vermont. Vermont History

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Historian, author, and lecturer Glenn A. Knoblock is the author of 14 previous books, including Arcadia Publishing's Historical Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast (1999), Portsmouth Cemeteries (2005), and Cemeteries Around Lake Winnipesaukee (2006).

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