Midnight Rites at North Norwich Cemetery

 Midnight Rites Recalled at N. Norwich Cemetery

Evening Sun, Norwich, NY, September 7, 1973

An interesting story from North Norwich [Chenango Co. NY] came to light while browsing through the pages of the early newspapers on file at Guernsey Memorial Library.  The story dated 1874 is about a midnight funeral.

The opening paragraph sets a mood very eloquently.  It is from the familiar experience of most that musical or melancholy sounds, the deep tone vibrations of a bell, a chant, or concert of human voices or a prolonged startling cry heard in the quiet stillness of the night or early morn, especially in a secluded neighborhood possess a solemn beauty of significance not at other times or under ordinary circumstances pertaining to them.  To be more precise the writer recollected that while a temporary resident in Virginia in 1848(?) listening to the plaintive and melancholy chant of a negro procession composed of a band of some 30 slaves accompanying their overseer and owner from an adjoining plantation on their way to a far southern home.

He explains that the untutored music of the human voice altered in deep tones of human woe and pathetic heart felt lamentation and sorrow are touching and expressive.

As the prolonged cadences gradually died away in the distance, they seemed like angel voices ineffectually mourning over the woes of afflicted humanity under the heaviest burdens of tyranny oppression and sin.  Within a few brief years the armies of the Republic were encamped on the very ground these hapless ones had trod upon.

The writer then goes on to say nearly 50 years have elapsed since I was awakened at the weird hour of a black winter midnight by the deep tones of the triangular bell of the old Baptist Church booming at long intervals its melancholy toll announcing the passage of a silent and solemn procession through the streets to the cemetery.

A few miles north of the village in that part of the town now known as North Norwich was the farm and residence of Roger Bissell a worthy and universally respected citizen with a large family of children.  One of these, the eldest and fairest, had recently become the wife of a prosperous and promising young man the eldest son of a wealthy farmer residing two miles south of the village.

Not many weeks however were destined to elapse before all these bright prospects were clouded over by the deepest gloom and desolation.

She contracted smallpox, believed to have been carried home to her by a brother of her husband who was teaching in one of the southern towns of the county.  there had been cases of smallpox in the area from which he came, and his school had been closed.

All present at a family gathering underwent vaccination with the exception of the bride who refused to be vaccinated.  the young man soon was desperately ill but those who had been vaccinated were not affected by the disease or any of its symptoms.  The young man recovered, but the blooming and lovely young bride was mortally stricken.

Beyond the immediate members of her family, her devoted husband, and the physician in attendance, only one individual could be found bold and fearless enough to arrange and superintend her funeral and attend the remains to their last resting place the story states.

So it was at the dark and gloomy hour of midnight the sad procession of mourners took up its dreary route along the deserted village streets to the burying place in the accompaniment of the tolling of the bell.  

The article states she had atoned with her innocent life for an impulse of unreasoning and fatal obstinacy. Everyone else was spared.  God had been merciful and gracious.