The Redcoat Skeleton

The weather is shifting , spring has arrived , softening the last brittle edges of winter , and the grim is nearing the end of its first season . Only a few episodes remain , but we intend to make them linger . This week we turn our attention to Bennington , vermont , a town wrapped in postcard charm , particularly during autumn's firebreak

crescendo . But beyond the leaf papers and whitewashed storefronts lies one of the most quietly powerful landmarks Bennington Center Cemetery . If you're drawn to old graveyards , not just for the dead but for what the dead leave behind , bennington Center belongs at the top of your list .

Founded in 1762 , the cemetery lies beside the Old First Church , a stark white colonial structure now spiritually divorced from the graveyard it once served . The cemetery is lovingly tended by the Bennington Center Cemetery Association and the care shows not just in the trimmed grass to the old-growth trees , but in the atmosphere . This is a place that breathes .

The hillslopes gently , shadows stretch long and if you look past the trees , the green mountains rise like ghosts in the distance , but it's the gravestones that truly seize you . Many are carved from white marble , an unusually defiant choice in the 18th century when slate , granite or sandstone were the norm .

Marble weathers poorly , soft and vulnerable to time , but here it lends the landscape an otherworldly brightness , like bones catching light long after sundown . One of the grounds when you'll find small signs , quiet place cards that do more than name the dead .

They draw your eye to the stone carvers , the artists , artisans and the unnamed hands who gave death a face . Carvings are fierce , precise , mournful . There's sermons in stone . Among them , zerubbabel Collins is the most prolific . Over 40 stones in Bennington Center bear his hand .

Unmistakably , once you know the signs their wings , skulls , blazing suns , soul effigies etched into pale marble , the grim iconography from a forgotten gospel . His apprentice , benjamin Dyer , carried the tradition forward and though the hands changed , the message remained you are dust and you will return . The message remained you are dust and you will return .

But Collins was not alone . His work is joined by stones from Ebenezer Soule , a master in his own right and heir to a remarkable four-generation dynasty of carvers . Soule's legacy extended through four sons , two grandsons , an adopted grandson and a great-grandson , a lineage of hands shaped by chisel and granite .

He was an itinerant carver , moving between Massachusetts , vermont and New Hampshire , leaving behind quiet masterpieces in graveyards like breadcrumbs through the wilderness . Southey likely passed through Bennington in the 1770s and his stones , some of the earliest in the cemetery , reflect a humble , haunting beauty .

His winged heads stare straight ahead , expressionless and eternal . Intricate feathers stretch beneath them . Wigs of curling stone rest atop their round faces and the crisp curves of their carvings stand in contrast to the cold finality of their inscriptions below . Nearby , the stones of Josiah Manning offer a different kind of presence heavier , more primal .

Manning's winged effigies don't gaze blankly , they glare . Some look startled , others angry . Their broad , simple faces echo African masks or Mesoamerican figures less refined but no less powerful . On one of his works , the Latin phrase memento memoriae remember you will die is carved like a whispered warning . Manning knew the words well .

He died in Connecticut and carved his own tombstone before passing . So much artistry scattered across centuries and stage converses here in one small Vermont cemetery . For those who understand what they're seeing , bennington Center isn't just a burial ground . It's a cathedral of carved morality , a Louvre of funerary art .

But for those who stop , who see and who listen , it offers something rare . Not just beauty , but memory . Not just memory , but meaning , and meaning here runs deep . Bennington is more than a quiet town . It's a name etched into the long shadow of the American Revolution .

In August 1777 , just 15 years after the cemetery was founded , the town found itself drawn into war . The Battle of Bennington , though , fought across the border , and while loomsack New York was aimed squarely at this place . The British came for a supply depot , but they left in ruin .

A detachment of British and Hessian troops , led by Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Baum , marched on Bennington , unaware that it would be met with fire and fury . Local militia led by General John Stark and bolstered by Seth Warner's Green Mountain Boys rose from the fields and forests to repel them .

Stark's words still echo in the dirt there are the Redcoats and they are ours . Or this night , molly Stark sleeps , a widow . They fought not just for provisions , but for their homes , their dead and their right to decide what would be written on their stones .

The British were broken , hundreds were killed or captured , and the ripple of that defeat weakened Burgund's campaign , clearing the way for American victory at Saratoga and , eventually , independence . But what is a battle , after all , if not a prelude to burial ?

Today , a monument near the center of the cemetery marks the graves of 75 soldiers from that conflict , british , hessian and American . All buried in the same earth , all claimed by the same silence . But not every grave here speaks the language of war . Some speak in poetry .

The far edge of the cemetery's sloping ground lies a modest slab headstone , plain , unadored and perhaps the most visited grave in

all of Vermont . Beneath it rests Robert Lee Frost , one of America's most celebrated and most quietly haunted poets . Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco , a world away from the frost-britten woods and stone fences that would later define his work . His early life was shaped by instability .

His father , a volatile journalist with Confederate sympathies , died of tuberculosis when Robert was just 11 . The family , penniless , relocated east to Massachusetts and from that moment on , hardship followed Frost like a shadow . He attended Harvard but never graduated . He labored as a teacher , a farmer , a factory worker , always writing , always observing .

For a time he and his family moved to England , where his first two collections were published to quiet acclaim . But it wasn't New England , especially New Hampshire and Vermont , that etched itself into his bones and became the bleak , beautiful stage for his poetry .

Frost's verse is famously deceptive , written in rural vernacular with pastoral imagery and conversational rhythms . But beneath the surface lies something colder . He wrote of walls that divided neighbors , woods that tempt with sleep , roads diverging in Frostlite's woods and truths too harsh to speak aloud .

His world was one where nature was not a bomb but a mirror , vast , uncaring and deeply indifferent . Though the public saw him as the voice of rustic American wisdom , frost was not a man unburdened . He won the Pulitzer Prize four times , read at John F Kennedy's inauguration and became a national symbol . But beneath the accolades was a life frayed by loss .

He buried his wife , eleanor , and four of their six children and then struggled with mental illness in the family , including a son's suicide and a daughter's institutionalization . As the decades passed , his poetry grew starker , the sentimentality eroded , leaving behind something sharper , more resigned . Death was no longer a metaphor .

It was real , present , inevitable , among the colonial dead , carved masterpieces and the casualties of war . A place heavy with history and haunted by memory , not in a theatrical way but in the still inescapable way of frost creeping in under a doorframe . His headstone is humble a plain slab of marble bearing his name , alongside Eleanor and several of their children .

Beneath it , an epithet carved like a final , reluctant truth , I had a lover's quarrel with the world . It's a line from his 1941 poem the Lesson for Today , and it reads both like a confession and a closing argument .

Not quite bitterness , not quite peace , just a weary acknowledgement that the world , for all its beauty and cruelty , was never quite home here , in this quiet cemetery , surrounded by the carved faces of the 18th century sole effigies and the long shadows of war . Frost is exactly where he belongs , not exalted but embedded , and another voice in the silence .

Another name on the stone , still quarreling quietly

with the world . Another name on the stone , still quarreling quietly with the world and the cemetery . On one side of the monument honoring the soldiers of the American Revolution reads a simple inscription , easy to overlook David Redding , loyalist , hung 1778 . At first glance it reads like a simple conclusion , final , uncomplicated .

But Redding's story , like the times he lived in , was anything but simple . It's a tale of war , betrayal of justice and doubt . Obonzo would not rest for nearly two centuries , a name nearly lost to history and a man whose death echoes still in the soil where he fell .

Reading was a loyalist , a man who sided with King George III in the blood-slick chaos of the American Revolution While others in Bennington were pledging themselves to independence . Reading threw in his lot with the British , enlisting in the Queen's loyal rangers and fighting under General Boyan during the failed 1777 campaign .

He escaped the disaster at Saratoga , but he didn't disappear . He stayed in the shadows carrying messages , gathering intelligence and slipping between enemy lines in plain clothes . It was his second life , not as a soldier but as a spy , that sealed his fate .

In 1778 , redding made a fatal mistake he attempted to steal muskets from a barn-turned-arson owned by Colonel David Robinson . It was a bold act of sabotage , and a clumsy one . He was caught red-handed . Worse , he was in civilian attire , stripping him of any protection as a combatant .

He was a traitor , plain and simple , and the Republic of Vermont , barely two years in its own radical experiment , was eager to make an example of him . Years in his own radical experiment , was eager to make an example of him . Redding was jailed in the barn behind the Canamunt Tavern , then broke out and fled toward Hoosick Falls , new York .

But he didn't make it . He was dragged back in chains . The gallows were raised . His first trial was flawed six jurors instead of 12 , a technicality under English law which Vermont still observed despite its independence . His lawyer , john Burham petitioned for a new trial and the Council of Safety agreed .

The execution was postponed by a week , but the crowd was already gathered . Hundreds came to see a man die . When the news broke of the delay , the mood turned violent until Ethan Allen himself arrived , just released from British captivity , allen quieted the mob by promising blood .

You shall see someone hung at all events , for if Redding is not then hung , I will be hung myself . The crowd dispersed and on June 11 , 1778 , justice , or something like it , was carried out At his second trial , this time with a full jury . Allen served as prosecutor . Redding was again found guilty of amical conduct .

His guards , sacked at the same man who had once let him escape , drove him to the execution site . The noose was waiting . David Redding became the first person ever executed by the Republic of Vermont . But that should have been the end . Instead , his body was claimed by Dr Jonas Fay , one of the men who had helped draft Vermont's Declaration of Independence .

Fay preserved Redding's skeleton for study , but something was off . According to local legend , he could never get the bones to quite fit properly together . The joints wouldn't align . The frame refused symmetry . Whispers grew that there was something wrong and maybe justice had not been fully served .

The skeleton passed in the hands of Dr William Towner of Massachusetts , who had no trouble assembling it . Redding's bones were used in medical instruction , passed through the generations of the Towner family , eventually stored in a chest in a dusty attic part relic , part curse . In the 1970s the skeleton resurfaced .

John Spargo , president of the Bennington Historical Museum , recovered the remains and placed them in the collection , but they were not put on display . They were not honored . A single photo in 1975 by Centennial Publications showed the bones folded , anonymous and waiting . And then finally came the burial .

In 1976 , nearly two centuries after his hanging , david Redding was laid to rest just miles from where he once swung from the gallows . His grave is marked now , not grand , not forgotten . A name , a date , a footnote in stone . Bennington Center Cemetery is more than a resting place . It's a ledger of lives and losses , chiseled in stone and softened by time .

Here the revolutionary dead lie beside poets , spies and forgotten souls , all watched over by the work of hands long vanished . The trees whisper and the marble gleams like old bone .

Every path is lined with reminders that the past is never truly silent and though time moves on outside its gates , within them it stands , still waiting for the living to remember and to reckon .

The grave grind for Bennington Center Cemetery was a maple nut brevet from the coffee bar . For more honorary grinds in the area , please visit the-grimcom . For now we're closing the gate on Bennington Center Cemetery . We hope you enjoyed our dig into history . If you did subscribe today to join us next time when we open the gate on the Grimm you