Madison history rises from the grave for popular cemetery tour | Madison Eagle News
MADISON – The historic Hillside Cemetery was the place to be in Madison on Saturday evening, Nov. 5, as more than 200 people followed flashlights and tiki torches for a walk among the tombstones.
Volunteers from the Presbyterian Church of Madison hosted their annual Dead of Night cemetery tour Saturday, in which six of the cemetery’s many notable denizens rose from their graves to tell the stories of their lives.
With more than 1,000 people interred at the nearly 300-year-old burial ground opposite Madison Junior School, there is no shortage of stories to tell.
Tour organizers choose different cemetery figures for volunteers to portray each year, from Revolutionary War veterans to Civil War heroes, local business owners and town mothers and fathers, 19th century titans of industry and Gilded Age socialites.
This year’s event attracted the largest public showing yet, with five groups of about 40 residents each cycling through from grave to grave at staggered start times on the unseasonably warm evening. Tour guides headed by volunteer cemetery superintendent Jim Burnet provided narration and historical tidbits as the crowds moved through the dark.
Upon climbing the hill to where the original Presbyterian church once stood in the 1700s, tour-goers were greeted with a warning from their first ghost.
Emerging from the dark was Joseph Bruen, a Minuteman with the Morris Militia during the American Revolution, portrayed by volunteer re-enactor Ed Rowland. He told the living to lower their voices, lest the British spies overhear.
Bruen was an original member of the church and a church trustee back when what is now Madison was part of the municipality of South Hanover. The specter told the crowd of communication methods used by patriot soldiers during the Revolution, including the use of signal fires and a famous cannon known as “Old Sow.”
“Remember Christmas Eve 1776 when George Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River and beat the British in Trenton and Princeton? The British retreated to New York City and General Washington’s troops camped in these parts,” Rowland recited.
“The general and his officers rode their horses right down the Kings Highway here on their way to Summit and Short Hills, so he could monitor British movements. In the Short Hills, patriots maned a famous cannon called ‘Old Sow.’ We used this cannon to signal that the British were advancing. The Old Sow sat atop Hobart Hill, and a local force guarded it day and night. When the cannon was fired, us Minutemen went into action.”
“Old Sow” would be put to use again in 1780, when Hessian troops marched on Morristown to reach Washington’s army. The village of Bottle Hill, now Madison, lay in the path of the assault. Bruen was among the Minutemen dispatched to what is now Union to halt the advance.
Rowland, wearing contemporary dress he had at home as a Revolutionary War re-enactor, told additional stories of famous figures, sites and events of the revolution in New Jersey, including battles Bruen participated in.
As he retreated back into the night, a tour guide played fife and drum music from an iPhone.
Next on the tour, residents encountered a man standing in solemn prayer: the ghost of William Osborn Stoddard, mourning the loss of contemporaries in the Civil War.
Stoddard, portrayed by Jim Downing, was an Illinois newspaper editor who followed Abraham Lincoln to the White House to become his personal secretary in 1860.
Stoddard had written the first newspaper editorial in the nation nominating Lincoln for the presidency. The editorial was widely circulated and became an early boon for Lincoln’s candidacy, Downing said.
Finding himself in the White House at just 25 years old, Stoddard managed all the letters addressed to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln.
“During the three years that I held this post, I became acquainted with almost every prominent man in the country. I was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the Union League of America, a consortium of quasi-secret men’s clubs that were established to promote loyalty to the Union,” Downing recited.
“One of the biggest thrills of my life was that I personally made the first hand-written copy of the Emancipation Proclamation,” he said, displaying an image of the document to the crowd.
After his White House years, he would enjoy further success as a major newspaper editor, U.S. Marshal and public telegraph executive before marrying and settling in Madison in the 1890s. As an older man he wrote some 76 children’s books, plus poetry, fiction, memoirs and biographies.
Downing displayed from a tablet a 1910 letter to the editor of the Madison Eagle, in which Stoddard encouraged Madison’s African American residents to vote in an upcoming election. He spent the last 30 years of his life in Madison, and has rested in Hillside Cemetery ever since.
Next on the tour, the ghost of Lou Noe emerged from a prop wooden coffin beside one of the most impressive gravestones in the cemetery. Noe, portrayed by Peter Teshima, told of how his family had already been in what is now Madison for generations before his birth in 1847.
His great-grandfather, Lewis Noe, was a French immigrant who served under the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution. His grandfather, Lewis Noe II, also served during the Revolution and built the original house on the Lewis Noe Farmstead on Southern Boulevard in Chatham Township around 1770.
Lou Noe left his own mark on the town. He was the builder of numerous greenhouses to support the budding rose industry in town, and later as a rose grower invented the American Beauty Rose, known as the “Queen of Roses.”
His son, also named Lou, would go on to become the largest producer of the American Beauty in the U.S.
“One of our favorite clients was Queen Victoria of England,” Teshima recited. “Every Christmas we would ship American Beauty roses for her holiday table settings at the palace.”
The family used ice from Noe Pond to pack its rose shipments. Lou Noe’s nephew, the recently deceased Bailey Brower of Chatham Township, would later convert the pond into the swimming and tennis club known today.
As the tour-goers made their way back down the hill toward Main Street, they next encountered the ghost of Fred Bardon, the founder of the Madison Eagle who also held various volunteer and professional posts around town. Portraying Bardon was Alex Parker-Magyar, the current editor of the Madison Eagle.
Bardon founded Madison’s first newspaper, the “Madison Eye Opener,” in 1877. Using an old-fashioned, foot-powered printing press, he was in charge of every aspect of the newspaper’s content and production. Though he was forced to sell the Eye Opener after falling ill a year later, he would buy it back again in 1882 and change its name to the Eagle.
Bardon was instrumental, along with Madison’s first mayor James Albright and others, in the Christmas Eve 1889 referendum vote for Madison to secede from Chatham Township and become its own town. A map of the proposed new borough and notice of the referendum were both printed in the paper; Parker-Magyar displayed the images to the crowd.
“The vote was 308 for and 145 against,” Parker-Magyar recited. “The vote passed and the Borough of Madison was born.”
Bardon wrote at the time that the town’s first councilmen should be “freeholders,” or white, male owners of debt-free land, whom Bardon said “realize the full value of a dollar.”
Bardon also became the bookkeeper of the first National Bank of Madison, which had its offices next to the Eagle in what is now the Madison Pharmacy building at the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue.
He would be elected the town’s tax collector, served 15 years on the Madison Board of Education, 25 years as president of the Madison Volunteer Fire Department and 14 years as volunteer organist for the Methodist church. He also managed the local boys baseball team.
He died at age 57 in 1916, having given back to the borough in numerous ways.
The next ghost on the tour, one of the most fascinating residents of the cemetery, addressed the crowds from her final resting place a few feet away from Main Street at the bottom of the hill. It was “Gypsy Queen” Louisa Harrison, played by Mary-Anna Holden.
“Who dares disturb the queen?” Holden asked, emerging from a prop coffin before explaining Louisa and husband Naylor Harrison’s 50-year reign over Romani gypsy tribes in the U.S in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Harrisons – millionaires from Naylor’s horse trading enterprise – would spend part of each year in Madison amid their cross-country travels with their gypsy band. The entire wagon camp would set up in Madison and the environs, with Louisa and Naylor living in an ornate, lavishly decorated wagon filled with all the finery of the day.
Beyond the value of the goods themselves, the wagon camp also held large sums of cash.
Holden told a humorous story of Naylor, who inherited the royal title by marrying Louisa, agreeing to deposit $5,000 of his money in a local bank. Upon later returning from a horse-trading trip in Florida, however, he was upset to learn that the bank did not have enough money on-hand to withdraw the entire $5,000 for him all at once.
The bank was ultimately able to cobble together the funds for Harrison, who simply took the cash back to his wagon, counted every dollar to make sure it was all there, and returned it to the bank the next day.
Every year after that, the bank would go to the Harrisons’ friend, Jim Burnet Sr., to ask him when the pair would be back in town so they could make sure they had the money. Burnet’s grandson, Madison Chief Financial Officer Jim Burnet, organized Saturday’s Dead of Night Hillside Cemetery tour as volunteer superintendent of the cemetery.
As Louisa Harrison was also a noted palm reader, Holden augured the future of crowd members who extended their palms.
“When you drive by in your car,” she concluded, “please look over at our marker and think of me and Naylor: the only king and queen to ever live in Madison.”
The final stop on the tour was the grave site of Andy Gee, played by Charles Courtney.
“This evening you have met some pretty famous and important Madisonians,” he said. “I am not that famous, but I have a story to tell and I have an important place here in the history of this cemetery.”
Born in 1880, Gee grew up playing baseball on the Madison Field Club team managed by Fred Bardon. His father opened Gee’s Pharmacy on the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue in 1897, where Avenue Travel now stands.
He showed pictures from his youth from around the turn of the century, and told a “fish story” to end all fish stories. Courtney recited how he and and a handful of friends went to the shore for a week of fishing in 1834, and returned to Madison with some 615 fish on ice.
Deciding to give the fish away to the public, “we caused a mob scene in the center of town.” Indeed, the headline in the Madison Eagle read: “Free fish distribution attracts mob Monday.”
Gee would join his father at the pharmacy, and the family would purchase today’s Madison Pharmacy building, “the Gee building,” from the Madison Eagle.
“My father eventually died, but I continued to run the pharmacy,” Courtney recited. “The business is still there today and is now called the Madison Pharmacy.”
Gee’s greatest legacy, however, would follow after his death at age 88 in 1968. In his will, the successful businessman donated some $25,000 to local churches and organizations, including the money that allowed the Presbyterian church to acquire the two lower portions of the cemetery in which he now rests.
“I am told that without those funds, the cemetery would be broke,” he said. “We have a shoestring budget here, but the cemetery would be overgrown and unmaintained were it not for my donation. The church continues to maintain this most holy and historic site to this day. And you can help too. The church sponsors clean up days where they fix stones and, honestly, save history.”
As tour-goers made their way to the exit, many helped to preserve that history.
Though the tour was free, residents dropped free-will donations into a miniature casket as they walked out. The church volunteers gained more than $1,500 for their nonprofit cause to preserve the historic site through the event, with 100 percent of the proceeds benefiting the cemetery.
