BY DAVE CHOATE

For once, a hearse was a cause for celebration.

On Saturday, Aug. 11, town officials and members of the hearse restoration committee dedicated Dunbarton’s newly revamped hearse and brand-new hearse house. About 100 residents and volunteers turned up at Page’s Cemetery for the dedication, information and refreshments.

“It was a real group effort over the last two and a half or three years, and the new house is really the center of the cemetery. We see this as being the epitome of a small town cemetery,” said cemetery trustee Brian Pike.

Restoration committee member Donna Dunn said the project took four years, including time for research.

The four main members of the committee exhaustively studied documents, scraps and photographs in an attempt to recreate the hearse and house as closely as possible.

“Our policy was ‘do no harm,’” Dunn said. “When re-creating this, we didn’t do anything if we weren’t one hundred percent sure it was the way it was done back then.”

The effort is part of a larger revitalization campaign aimed at making the cemetery active again. Pike said eventually the cemetery will feature new burial plots with three intertwining roads around the land.

The hearse has had an interesting history of its own, having claimed 13 different parts of town as its home at some point in its history. A then-teenage Kevin Bartlett discovered the hearse lying under a pile of rubble during a bike ride back in 1970.

“It’s had a checkered past, but it survived somehow. It was literally sitting there with the roof on it, so I guess nobody really cared about it back then,” said Bartlett, who put the hearse’s old wheels into the hearse house for visitors to see.

Fellow committee member Boynton braved the heat in a black suit and top hat as he drove the hearse and horse Spike around the cemetery yard. Other members of the crowd, including committee members Gail Martel and Nancy Frost, chose to wear the dark-colored period clothing to dedicate in the new hearse with style.

In addition to the house and hearse, displays were set up to show the rebuilding process and the history behind the hearse. There was also a tribute to Henry Provencher, who Dunn said performed countless hours of carpentry work for the hearse project before he passed away on July 7.

Dunn said the committee is still looking for answers as to where the hearse came from, as it was almost certainly originally purchased from another town in the area. There are also photographs which need to be more closely and perhaps digitally scrutinized to reveal their secrets, work that Dunn is hoping the group will have some help with.

“We’re still working on figuring a lot of things out. I’m hoping someone will jump in and help us solve these mysteries,” Dunn said.