More on the Old West Bradford Cemetery

In September of 2014 I wrote about a horrible tragedy that is commemorated in our cemetery -- the old West Bradford cemetery on Hackett Hill Road. Inasmuch as I've lived adjacent to it these last 52 years, I feel a strange proprietary connection to the people it houses. I've wandered in it, tended it, studied it, and cleaned up the trash left behind by visitors. I know that old burial ground very well.

Here's what I wrote seven years ago: 

"The old West Bradford cemetery, which is carved out of our land, is peopled by the Worthleys, Hacketts, Kidders, and Sleepers who first settled this part of Vermont. Some of them were long lived, some wandered through this thoroughfare of woe only briefly. There are o-so-many of those sad stone lozenges at the foot of a grave that represent infants who died too young to be christened.  

Our most disturbing gravestone, in my opinion, is the the one for Stanley Franklin Dwinell, M.D., born in 1920 and who died along with James Scott Dwinell (age 7), Peter Dewey Dwinell (age 6), and Jonathan Dwinell (age 2) all on the same day, December 11, 1952.  What a horror, I thought -- a man and his three young sons all gone at once. A tragedy. But what sort?  A plane crash?  A boating accident? House fire?  Perhaps even an infectious disease. 

An internet search came up empty-handed, so I enquired of our longer-tenured neighbors. Here's the local legend as it was reported to me. "Oh yes, the vet," I was told (although the tombstone distinctly says M. D., rather than D. V. M).  "He was driving along Route 5 in Fairlee one winter morning and it was an icy road and foggy and he went out of control and all four of them died instantly. His wife was at home drinking a cup of coffee when she got the phone call. She left the coffee half-finished on the kitchen table, left the house without a word, and was never seen again. Didn't even take her clothes. Just disappeared."    

It's a dramatic, heartbreaking story that sounds like the plot of a short story by Alice Munro -- but I don't believe it, not a word of it. The same gravestone that records the four simultaneous deaths also asserts that Constance S. Dwinell, wife of Doctor Stanley Franklin Dwinell, died January 25, 1985, at age 65. 

I'm trying to imagine the remainder of poor Constance's life. It's hard to construct a scenario that isn't completely dreadful. Most likely, Constance returned, shattered, to the small town in New Hampshire, let us say, where she must have been born. She moved back into her parents' house and took a job as a town librarian, her life blighted by the tragedy. She never remarried.

But I prefer to imagine that after a period of intense mourning, she moved to Paris (she had majored in French at Wellesley, I'm guessing,) and never told a soul about her first family. There she was wooed and won by Baron Guy de Condorcet de Noialles but could never conceive a child. It was a long happy marriage. After Guy died, crashing his motorcycle on a winding Riviera road, she returned to the States a rich woman, and lived out her life in a Park Avenue apartment in New York. Friends and neighbors who had no idea of her first life were shocked when they read the will which specified that she be buried, along side Stanley and the children, right here in West Bradford. 

That's my story and I'm sticking with it though I would very much like to know the truth."  

Then a year later, I was contacted by Larry Coffin, president of the Bradford Historical Society. My local informant, it turns out, was all wrong about the circumstances of the accident. Mr Coffin wrote this: "I would like to correct your information on Dr. Stanley Dwinell. He and his three sons were killed in a collision with a train on a crossing in Newbury, VT as he was going to treat a patient at Woodsville (NH) Cottage Hospital. His father Dr. Franklin Dwinell was in a car following."  Mr. Coffin did not comment on the half-finished coffee cup.

[February 11, 2021.  I've now received the following communication from a correspondent who calls him/herself "R". He or she is a "descendant of Stanley's brother" and has sent me the link to this article In the Rutland Daily Herald.  How could I have missed it?

 

 

 

So that's a slightly different version of the horrible story. The details are different, but it's the same story in essence.

"R" also refers me to a letter in the Bradford Opinion by attorney Bud Otterman of Otterman and Allen. It offers other details from the prior accounts but it's no less tragic. "Franklin Dwinell was a a longtime doctor in Bradford when I opened my law office in 1951. His son, Dr. Stanley Dwinell, had come home from World War II and joined his father's practice.Their patients went to the old Cottage Hospital near the railroad tracks in Woodsville. One of the doctors would visit their patients each morning. When Stanley went, he would often take his three pre-school sons with him. They would play in the waiting room while their dad made his rounds. The morning of December 11, 1952 was overcast with cold rain and snow in the air. About 11:30 am Dr Franklin Dwinell was called to an accident at the grade crossing south of Newbury Village. When he arrived, he found his son and his three grandson dead as a result of a collision with a southbound train. There were no warning lights at the crossing."

"R" also says that Constance (Stanley's wife and the mother of Dwinell children) "wasn't alone after Stanley and the boys passed. They had an older daughter who was 7 and in school at the time of the accident. She's moved away from the area and is reportedly somewhere out west now."

The older daughter, Hannah Dwinell, would therefore be 76 years old, as I write this, if she is still alive. I feel for her. She had to overcome the loss of her father and three younger brothers. Such an event would leave an irremediable scar. I hope Hannah has had a good life. I wonder if she has ever returned to West Bradford. It would be most painful for her to do so. 

[I've also written about "my" cemetery here.]

Comments

[Sawyer]

My dad told me this story when i visited their graves because i´m related to them on my dad´s side my dad knew constance when he was younger and my grandma elna was buried at the Ilsley tombstone which is near the dwinell her name was Elna Dwinell Ilsley I am Sawyer and i am glad you found out what happened even though my family already knew iḿ glad others like their story

[Mary K. Wakeman]

So James Scott and Hannah were twins? Boy! Survivor guilt. My father was a twin who lost his other half at the age of 29, and lived with that SG stuff, which had an affect on his children.