Smallpox Cemetery
On the brow of the hill in a corner of the pasture on the former Benjamin Pierce farm, now owned by Horace Deschenes, is a small plot of ground fenced off by a tumble-down stone wall and looking down on the Contoocook River below Cheshire Factory. Two gravestones peered over the wall for many years and could be seen from the road below, but every trace of memorial has long since vanished.
No Potters field of dead waifs and strays was ever more neglected than this graveyard where many new-made towns, if they could count it as a possession, would erect a monument and make it an honored shrine. No path leads to this forsaken enclosure. No one comes here now except that occasionally a mild-eyed cow, standing by the stone wall, chews her ruminative cud and wonders vaguely if it be worth the while to climb over the obstruction to crop the sparse herbage within. It is the old smallpox cemetery.
Six are buried here apart, a most incongruous company, as will appear below, but enough of tragedy and heartbreak is buried in this little forsaken plot to out-weigh the grief for a hundred in the ordered communities of the dead. Here no prayers were offered, no family and no friends gathered about, no earth to earth, no dust to dust was said here. Rather the burial was at night, as if it were the work of ghouls and not of men.