At the time of the Great Famine in Ireland, desperate and emaciated Celts tried everything to escape poverty and starvation. They would even board “coffin ships” for the United States and Canada knowing that a third of them would die on the voyage. A group made their way to the Mad River Valley and built a settlement on Moretown’s South Hill Road in the 1850s. It is there that you will find St. Patrick’s Cemetery where the Irish Catholics were buried, in part, because they weren’t welcome on The Valley floor. The Irish spoke Irish, not English. And I am sorry to say that fear of and distain for immigrants who speak a different language and have a completely foreign culture is nothing new in the United States.
When I first visited there in 2022, it upset me that the graveyard was desolate and unkept. Being that I am Irish Catholic, the sight of a prominent name like Mary O’Connor on a headstone in this neglected graveyard made my heart sink. For an O’Connor is the descendant of kings.
This area is also referred to as Paddy Hill or Patty Hill. (FYI: “Paddy” is short for Padraig, the Irish for Patrick. To call someone a Paddy is an ethnic slur. You don’t want to use it when addressing an Irish person.)
Many of the men of Paddy Hill worked in Northfield for Central Vermont Railroad. The northeast corner of the St. Patrick Cemetery looks to be empty, but it is really a series of unmarked graves filled with those workers who caught and died of diphtheria during an epidemic in the 1870s. The bodies were carried back to Moretown in the middle of the night to be buried because of the fear and stigma surrounding the outbreak. In preparation for this visit I had read a booklet, “A Brief History of Moretown Vermont,” written in 1982 by a direct descendant of these people. In it author Mary Reagan calls the area a mass grave. But parishioners of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on the main street of town arranged for the area to be studied with ground penetrating radar (GPR). This technology can find where the earth was disturbed by digging. Though the graves were extraordinarily close together, it is clear that they were buried in a respectful manner. But it remains uncertain how many people are buried there and who they were.
The stairs of the first St. Patrick Church still remain. In a 1972 history document Mary Reagan further tells us that the land for the cemetery was deeded on March 15, 1841. And in her pamphlet, “The first Catholic Church in Moretown was built in 1857. . .” Once the Irish community had the land it took 16 years to build the church.
It's interesting that there was once a school up there on the hill as well. As many as 60 children attended at a time. Part of the foundation of the building can still be found. Though records show that while these early settlers were desperately poor, they were clever and hard workers. By 1882 the Irish citizens of Moretown were making about the same amount of money as others in town.
In “A Brief History of Moretown, Vermont” Ms. Regan also wrote in the booklet that the cemetery, “. . . was located on South Hill in the area where the cross now stands.” To clarify, she meant the cross that once was the crowning glory of the first St. Patrick Church which had been dismantled and moved down to Route 100B. But the cross remained and was fastened to a large piece of granite in the cemetery, where the granite remains to this day. Mary Reagan’s mention of a cross was in the 1980s. But when I had come to do research there two years ago, 2022, there was no cross in sight.
Parishioner Bob Mays was determined to find it. Call it serendipity if you must, but I say it was divine intervention. Just by asking a few questions, Bob tracked the remains of the cross down. It was being stored in the loft of a business in Duxbury. The owner of the shop told him, “It’s so rotten I was going to burn it. But burning a cross? It didn’t seem right.”
When Bob examined the pieces he determined that it was made entirely of cedar. And he was sure it could have been 167 years old, which is when the first church was built. He found a sawmill in the Northeast Kingdom that works with cedar wood. The owner produced the lumber required to rebuild the cross. What is heartwarming is that when the miller was told this wood was to make a cross for the church, he refused payment.
Bob took the lumber home and used the pieces of the original cross as guides to recreate the cross.
This seemed to inspire townspeople — Catholic and not. A crew cut and cleaned brush. Weeds were pulled. Just a few days ago, when I took the picture above, I found a serene setting. A cemetery where history abounds. And that cross? At 9-feet-tall it sends a mighty message: these are sacred grounds.
Mary Kathleen Mehuron lives in Waitsfield. You can reach her at
