Man digs hole on his and, discovers buried history

Old unmarked graves, including that of a soldier in the War of 1812, are found in Lyman.

From the Portland Press Herald, January 28, 2007

Noel K. Gallagher, Staff Writer

     LYMAN- Roland was digging out a gravel bank on his land last summer when he made a grisly discovery: Near the edge of an old cellar foundation, his backhoe had triggered a sudden explosion of mice and what looked like human remains.

     “Somehow or another I wound up with a body.  It was quite a shock,” Nadeau said.  He didn’t know it, but he had stumbled across an old, unmarked family cemetery containing seven bodies, including the grave of Gibbens Kimball, a soldier from the War of 1812.

    “We didn’t even know it was there and we’ve owned this property ten years,” said Nadeau’s wife, Pauline.  “It has sparked a lot of interest.”

     There had been rumors of a soldier’s grave in the area, but no one knew exactly where, let alone what war. Even so, a town official would put up a flag every Memorial Day In the center of a nearby field, right up until she moved away two years ago.  

     Since the bones were near an old foundation, Lyman Code Enforcement Officer Polakewich thinks the house there probably burned in the 1947 wildfires that swept through the area, taking the house but were likely wooden grave markers. At the time, many families who lost everything in the fires just abandoned their properties and moved into town to work at mills, which would explain how the graveyard and its history had mostly faded from memory, he said.

    “I’ve been doing this 26 years and this is the first time I’ve ever run into something like this”, Polakewich said. “It was quite interesting.”

     Pauline Nadeau remembers that day very well: “All of a sudden (Roland) came in here and he was very, very pale.  He said he thought he found a human leg bone… and sure enough it turned out to be one.”

     They called the police, who in turn called Maine State Police and the Medical Examiner’s Office.  They evacuated the rest of the body and found an oval medallion in mint condition, about three inches by six inches, inscribed with the name Charles Kimball and his birth date.

     After checking the area immediately surrounding the site, officials told Nadeau he could resume digging. But a few days later, he turned up another body, along with a casket and some red lining.  The Medical Examiner’s Office came back, removed he remains, covered the area with a tarp and some soil and told Nadeau to stop digging.

     A state police detective researched “Charles Kimball” and previous property owners at Lyman Town Hall, then turned to the Lyman Historical Society. It was there that society member Pricilla Miles found a reference to an old grave site that was vaguely described as being “a quarter mile westerly from the home of Margaret Rummery.”

     “Luckily there were still a few of us around who knew Margie and knew where her house was, said Miles. Rummery died in the 1960’s.

     Armed with that information, Miles at the historical society passed along the following information from “Maine Cemetery Inscriptions”, which included an oral history from Miles.

     (Buried in the Kimball plot) is Lyman Kimball…Also buried here (according to Miss Margaret Kimball) was Gibbens Kimball, a soldier in the War of 1812 and his wife (nee Weymouth); Orin Kimball and his wife (nee Hodgins); Charlie, Orin’s son, who was accidently killed on a railroad; and Orin’s infant daughter, Ruth, Miles read.

     As a pre-1880 graveyard, the site is considered an “ancient cemetery” and because it contains the remains of a soldier, the town must be responsible for its upkeep.  Lyman selectmen and the Nadeaus have agreed to re-bury in the same location this spring, once the snow melts.

     A librarian at the State Historical Society said there is no record of Gibbens Kimball in the pension records or the list of military dead from the War of 1812 Because the war predated Maine statehood, soldiers from the region were considered Massachusetts soldiers.

     Pauline Nadeau said her own research said her own research turned up the fact that there were two Kimball properties, theirs and a neighboring piece of property owned by two brothers, she thinks.

     “Ours were probably the poor relations”, she joked, noting that the other property has a clearly marked Kimball family cemetery with granite headstones.”

     Headstones or not, it is just one of many graves of a soldier from a long-ago war, according to Rod Stewart, the commander of the local American Legion post. “We have people who died in Andersonville (a Civil War battle {prison}) and a soldier buried out on Route 111, John Burbank, who sailed with John Paul Jones, he said.

     Stewart is now working with the Veterans Administration to get a marker for Gibbens.