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New Information
A while ago I was contacted by a lady that was doing research on the Bickford cemeteries. She has given me permission to include her findings here. Instead of rewriting what she has told me I am going to let her tell this in her own words. From Ella VanCamp:
HI....I just got back from New
Hampshire....and I found 2 Bickford cemeteries off of Trask
Hill Rd.!!
I had contacted Jeff Burrows who is one of the cemetery
trustees in Sandwich, NH as well as the mailman! I figured
he might be able to help me. He was able to copy a little
information from a book he had. He included a 1931 map for
us to follow. We were skeptical that the map would do us
any good, but we went to North Sandwich anyway. We found
that a new home had been built off of Trask Hill Rd. No one
was home on Saturday when we went there. We looked around
for a while and found what we thought was described online,
but didn't hike in very far because we didn't have long
pants on. We went back the next day and talked to the
people in the house. She told us where she had seen a sign
on a tree on the old Bickford Place down the road and around
the corner. We drove there and found the sign on the tree.
It read:
Bickford Place
James Brier Pre-1844
2 Owners
Addie Bickford died in childbirth
1894
John Bickford died in poverty
Henry Dorr 1900
White Mountain Paper Company 1901
The owner from the house who we talked with told us we would
not find any headstones there. After reading the sign, we
decided to hike up the hill a little further to look
around. We found what looked to be an opening wide enough
to have once been a road. We hike up the hill further and
found a sign on the tree which said, Bickford Cemetery! And
there was one headstone there. It read:
Mother
Addie Bickford
1862-1894
We noticed there were four 18' pipes (approximately) laying
on the ground to form a square around the headstone. We
assumed this was the entire cemetery plot. We didn't find
any other smaller stones in the plot, but we didn't have any
tools to dig around and move the leaves, etc. So, there may
have been more, but we didn't see any.
We decided to leave and go back to the opening we had seen
the day before on the other side of the road, which
according to our 1931 map was the Trask farm area. My son
and I hiked in about a half mile going through lots of tall
ferns and around a fallen tree. We split up briefly and
when I came to a "T" in the path, my son called from the
right that he had found a sign. It read:
BI
SPRUCE
We could not make out the rest of the sign. It was a white
sign with the above letters hand written on it in what
looked to be a blue permanent marker. After studying the
sign for a few minutes, I looked up and said to my son,
"Look behind you." There was a row of stakes in the ground
each with a first name on written down the side in white
paint! There were 13 stakes all together. Each stake was
about 1 1/4 inch square and stood about 3 feet out of the
ground. They were all in one line. There was also some
blue plastic tape stretched between the trees on each side
of the sign....in an attempt to show people where to enter
the 'cemetery'. The names on the stakes were as
follows....as we passed the sign and walked toward the first
of 13 stakes in a row:
RACHEL
NATHAN
SIENA
MARISA
JENNIFER C.
NICHOLAS (We had
to look closely at this one because the paint was
faded on the stake.)
SARAH
JENNIFER B.
MICHAEL
MELISSA
JONATHAN
SAMANTHA
MATHEW
Isn’t that cool? We could not find any dates any place
around the area. There was also a very large boulder near
the first couple of stakes, but we didn't see anything
etched on it either.
Thought you might want to hear about what we found on the
old Trask farm and the old Bickford farm....both located off
Trask Hill Road in North Sandwich, New Hampshire. I hope to
see if I can research more about these two places and come
up with some dates. Talk to you later. Ella Van Camp
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