Commissioner Steve Shurtleff urged the Board of Merrimack County commissioners Thursday to consider repairing and formally naming the small cemetery adjacent to the county nursing home and the rail trail. Shurtleff described visiting the site twice in a week and finding multiple broken headstones, dozens of graves marked only by numbers and several child burials dating to the late 19th century. "I found the graves of 4 children ... one was a girl who died at 4 weeks," Shurtleff said. "The saddest headstone was one that simply marked a number. It was the child that died in 1869." Mary, a county nursing‑home staff member who inventoryied the stones, told commissioners the facility keeps a photo inventory of named and numbered stones on a history wall at the nursing home but that older handwritten records linking numbers to names appear to have been lost, possibly in fires that destroyed earlier nursing‑home records. "We did take pictures of the cemetery. We made an inventory of all of the stones that did have names on them, and all the stones that have numbers on them," Mary said. Shurtleff suggested the board consider a dignified name such as "Riverview" to acknowledge the Merrimack River view from the site; other speakers referenced the site’s alternate listings as the Merrimack County Almshouse or "Pauper Cemetery." Commissioners agreed to follow up. The board asked staff to research records and to pursue cost estimates to repair and reset headstones snapped by fallen tree limbs. No formal vote or binding action to rename the cemetery was recorded; commissioners said they would return with additional information and possible next steps. Public comments and commissioner remarks placed the cemetery’s origin in 1865, shortly after the Civil War, when a state law created county nursing homes and almshouses and the cemetery began to receive burials through the 1930s, with the transcript noting the last burial around 1937. Speakers cited about 329 memorials with names and about 158 graves marked only by numbers, and staff said some numbered markers may only be placeholders rather than individual burials. The commissioners praised maintenance staff for mowing and clearing the remote site and asked county staff to bring back estimates for stone repairs and options to add a sign identifying the site.
