MEMBER SIGN IN
Not a member? Become one today!
         iBerkshires     Berkshire Chamber     MCLA     City Statistics    
Search
Our Neighbors: The Hillside Hotel
By Paul W. Marino, iBerkshires Columnist
10:28AM / Saturday, May 16, 2015
Print | Email  

Hillside Cemetery in about 1893. Burials began to decline with the open of Southview Cemetery.

Rooms without a view in the vault at Hillside. Coffins were stored during the winter until the ground thawed.

A propane thawer in use at Southview around 1980. Fewer coffins had to be stored once these came into use.

A room in the vault used for maintenance equipment. It had been used as a mortuary at one time.


The vault on Brown Street was built those who had to wait for their final resting place and as a mortuary.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Back in the early 1990s, I produced a documentary for Public Access TV titled "Cities of the Dead." It was — surprise, surprise — about the cemeteries of North Adams, but one thing that was not explained in it was where the title comes from.  Interestingly, it comes from the same source as the title of this series.

For many years, Italians have referred to coffins as houses of the dead. And since cemeteries are packed with houses of the dead, it makes sense to think of a cemetery as a city of the dead. But to take that logic even further, the residents of those cities are our neighbors. Eventually, some of them will be our neighbors in a literal sense. But these neighbors built our city from the ground up.

So it behooves us to pay our respects to these neighbors, to get to know them and their contributions to us and our city. Likewise, it behooves us to be good neighbors; not only in visiting sometimes, but in taking proper care of their communities. The purpose of this series is to generate interest in Hillside Cemetery and the efforts to restore it.

If a cemetery is a city, it's important to recall what else one can find in a city. Things like streets. In most cemeteries, there are roads, or paths at least; Hillside has both. A water system is another amenity, and Hillside has one. Roam around and you'll find water faucets sticking up. But Hillside also has something else that most cities have: A ... hotel?

OK, it's not literally a hotel, but it serves somewhat the same function. What I'm talking about is, of course, the receiving vault, though there are in fact two. You may have observed that Hillside was not given that name for laughs? I know some people who call the hill off Brown Street "Cardiac Hill." Every time I climb that hill, I realize more and more the accuracy of that title.

But the real significance of the hills is that burial in the winter is virtually impossible. So what do you do with your dear departed when "burial season" is months away? You check them into a hotel, of course! Except that in these hotels, you provide your own room, as it were. The hotel provides a shelf for the coffin to rest upon.

Hillside is unusual in that it has two receiving vaults, as most have only one. The first was built into the side of the hill fronting on West Main Street (Route 2) in 1865. It has a huge stone lintel and a small iron door held closed with a chain and a padlock. I used to bring people in there on Cemetery Walks, but I haven't for a long time. Every year he let me take people in, the cemetery foreman would have to replace the lock, which gets terminally rusted from road salt thrown on it by the plows.

Not that there's much to see. It has a cave-like quality, consisting of a single small chamber with stone shelves to put the coffins on, as well as two shallow indentations, one on either side. The most impressive things are A) the shelves are nearly two inches thick and B) the space between them is so narrow, the coffins put on them had to pretty cramped.

Another interesting feature is the evidence of a vent that used to go up through the roof.  The only thing the vault contains today are some headstone fragments and a rusty old probe. Probe, you may ask? Today, caskets are interred in a crypt of concrete or plastic that  is sealed before the actual burial takes place. Look into a freshly dug grave and you may see the exposed outer wall of the crypt next door.

But in days gone by, graves were not measured in such strict dimensions. Headstones were not always used. When digging a grave, you first had to know what was down there. So you used a probe, a rod of iron that you drove down into the ground.  If it hit wood, that ground was occupied; if not, you were free to dig.

The second receiving vault, built in 1893, is palatial by comparison. Fronting on Brown Street with a circular drive in front of it, the vault was massively built of stone blocks. Its entryway has a Roman arch and is blocked with an ornate pair of iron gates. Five or six feet farther in are the doors. Thick, heavy wooden doors. And beyond the doors? Shelves: nearly a hundred of them, built of wood, each with a flip down hatch and large enough to hold a modern casket. Light and air are admitted through windows at either side, each at the bottom of a shallow air shaft.

But it has another feature as well. It has two large empty spaces, one on either side of the entrance.  Used to store lawn mowers, fuel and oil today, they were built with quite a different purpose in mind.  

In those days, there was no such thing as a morgue. When a John or Jane Doe turned up who needed to be autopsied and/or identified, they had to be kept somewhere. That somewhere was in the back room of an undertaking establishment. As you may well imagine, undertakers didn't like having their back rooms cluttered up with nonpaying customers (especially since they were also in the furniture business). So when the new vault was built, these two rooms were designed in to function as a morgue.

And the vault is also missing something. When it was built, there were plans to build a chapel in front of it, a chapel that was plainly never built. My guess is that two things are responsible for this lack:   Expense is the likeliest culprit, but in addition, by the mid-1890s burials in Hillside were slacking off. In 1888, the town started a new cemetery on South Church Street. Burials continued in Hillside where space in existing lots permitted, but with acres of available space, Southview was already becoming the more important cemetery.

The receiving gate to the Hillside 'hotel.'

Given this fact, it's curious as to why folk thought they needed a chapel at the city's receiving vault. I say "needed" by design; the chapel's proponents did not consider it a luxury, but a necessity. It all relates to an old funeral custom that has now happily gone the way of the dodo.

As late as the 1890s, it was customary to hold vigil over the deceased until he/she was buried. Look back to the scene in Huckleberry Finn when Huck goes to hide the stolen money in the coffin. When he enters the parlor, there are two men asleep in rocking chairs with shotguns on their laps. While not properly doing their jobs, these two men are holding vigil over the body.

But when someone died in the winter and would not be interred until spring, this meant that the unhappy vigil-keepers would have to hold their vigil in the receiving vault. Considering that it's cold in there in the summer, in the winter it must be brutal. Hence, someone would go to hold vigil, come home sick and wind up with someone holding vigil over him, too! The proponents of the chapel argued that a chapel would provide a place of relative comfort for vigil-keepers.

Winter burial in Southview is common now. The snow is dug away and a quonset hut-shaped stove is placed on the ground and hooked up to a propane tank.  This throws heat down into the ground, thawing the ice in the earth so it can be dug out with a backhoe. But the receiving vault is still in use today, and not just to store lawn mowers.

The few burials in Hillside are stored there, as well as people waiting to be interred in the surrounding hilltowns like Florida, Savoy, Monroe and Readsboro. Anyone who is going to be shipped cross country will also be placed in the vault until the arrangements have been made. So as you can see, the receiving vault really does function as a hotel of sorts, giving "travelers" a place to stay until it's time for them to move on.

This series is an attempt to help us get to know a particular community of neighbors, without whose vision and efforts this city would not exist. These neighbors are the residents of Hillside Cemetery. As part of our effort to restore and maintain this, the city’s oldest municipal cemetery, we hope to generate interest, funding and volunteer labor in an effort to restore it.  This work is an important step in maintaining our city's heritage and civic pride. But more than this, it's a way in which we can help our neighbors; neighbors who laid the foundations of North Adams and paved the way for us.
 

0Comments
More Featured Stories
NorthAdams.com is owned and operated by: Boxcar Media 102 Main Sreet, North Adams, MA 01247 -- T. 413-663-3384
© 2011 Boxcar Media LLC - All rights reserved