By Rick Sawyer
How can an entire cemetery disappear? It would seem that it couldn't, but then where is it? The first settlers arrived in the 1760s and in the early town records it shows that the townspeople voted:
To see if they will agree to work one Day for to fense in A Burying Place, and to act on aney other afairs that May Be thought Proper.
March ye 2, 1767 VOTED to clear a Burying Place and fence it one Day.
And again they met three years later:
To see if the inhabitants of the Town will put the burying yard in something better order and act on anything else they shall think proper on the Lord's Day.
March 5, 1770 VOTED to work on the Burying Yard the 25th of April.
There is a Jonah Dodge mentioned in the same early records who was buried "near the Indian Camping Ground" which may have been south of Parker Point near what was referred to as Indian Point or possibly somewhere else nearby in what is today known as Blue Hill Falls.
We do know from the old records that by 1794 at least 45 people had died in Blue Hill, including a few of the early settlers such as Ebenezer Hinckley in 1776, Jonah Dodge and James Candage in 1788, and Ezekiel Osgood in 1790. In 1793 alone Mary Blasdell and Ezekiel Osgood Jr. lost 4 children under age 10.
In the oldest known cemetery in Blue Hill The Old Cemetery of 1794, the oldest headstone is Mrs. Mehitable Witham who died on August 8th 1800. In fact this is the oldest headstone in the town of Blue Hill.
Where are all the other headstones of everyone who died before 1800?
So far no one has been able to locate this old, old cemetery.