Expansion
New lots in the Old Cemetery have not been laid out or sold since 1954. Even before the First World War, it was clear that space was running out. To accommodate the growth of the Catholic population and in order to minister to its need for a place to bury its dead, Bishop George Albert Guertin acquired an additional 82 acres (330,000 m2) in the town of Bedford, a half-mile west of the Old Cemetery. His timing was prophetic.
The Spanish Influenza, the flu epidemic that followed America’s soldiers home from the trenches of France and Belgium, took so many lives that there was no time for most families to plan for and acquire lots. The dead were numbered and buried in rows in large common graves. The practice of funeral Masses for the dead was suspended to allow for swifter burial, and committals, called “Dispensations”, took place right at graveside. The first several sections of the New Cemetery filled quickly as a result.
Read more about this topic: St. Joseph Cemetery (Manchester, New Hampshire)
Famous quotes containing the word expansion:
“Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)