For nearly 50 years, the Whalon-King Cemetery located on Highland Avenue sat in ruin.

Grass was overgrown, with all 14 of the graveyard’s headstones toppled over and covered in dirt and old beer bottles.

“Nothing was vertical here,” said Westport resident Troy Rebello. “Everything was just shattered and broken.”

Thanks to years of work from Rebello and other Westport Gravestone Cleaning and Restoration Group volunteers, the cemetery is now coming back to life.

“This is incredible,” said Dartmouth Historical Commission Chair Judy Lund. “Everything is cleaned and repaired.”

The first recorded burial was in 1856 of Abby Whalon Trafford, the wife of one of the Trafford brothers who owned the nearby Westport Factory on State Road. The mill, which made cotton carpet twine, ceased operation in the 1930s.

The total of 14 graves are for families that worked at the mill.

There are also numerous fieldstones, volunteer Todd Baptista said, that likely indicate the unmarked graves of some of the Quakers who lived in the area. He said that prior to the 1840s, Quakers did not believe in having formal headstones.

However, fellow volunteer Laura Oliveira theorized those graves could belong to the French Canadians who worked at the mill.

“If the Canadian mill workers had no money, they would have done the fieldstones out of necessity,” she said.

According to fellow volunteer Todd Baptista, the cemetery began to fall into disrepair sometime around the mid-1970s, likely due to drunk vandals.

“Neighbors told us that back then, people would come in here and have parties,” Baptista said.

Fellow volunteer Dawn Young, who grew up and still lives on Highland Avenue, recalled those vandals going there in her youth.

“I was never allowed to go here specifically because of the reputation here,” she said.

Young also recalled seeing the stones only for them to eventually disappear from view, obscured by years of overgrowth and neglect. 

“You couldn't even see in here because there were so many trees,” she said. “I never imagined in my lifetime I would ever see a stone here again.”

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that some form of care began. 

Baptista noted that John Hazard, who lived right next to the cemetery, started to trim the long grass regularly — but that is all he was able to do.

Efforts to restore the headstones began in 2019 after a descendent of one of the families buried at the Whalon-King Cemetery reached out to the Westport-based group.

From there, Baptista assembled a group to train with Connecticut-based gravestone restoration expert Jonathan Appell.

Upon getting permission from the Town of Dartmouth this past April, the core group of four officially began on-site work — all of which is privately funded.

Every weekend since, the core group of Baptista, Rebello, Oliveira, and Young have met to prop up the old stones, along with filling the gaps in with material like epoxy putty. 

Other volunteers have also assisted the group in helping clean the stones, along with a crane operator who helped haul the 500-pound base of Abby Whalon Trafford’s grave.

Following the transport, Baptista said the volunteer learned the grave belonged to an ancestor of his grandchildren.

The last of the work was completed on Wednesday, July 20.

“In total, we’ve done about 85 hours of manpower in the past six weeks,” Baptista said.

While it’s been a lot of work, the volunteers don’t mind. Oliveria noted that cleaning the graves has been especially therapeutic.

“If you want to do something that is solitary but contributing to the community, this is great,” she said.

Restoration of the cemetery has also served as a way to learn about these families who lived here so long ago and keep their legacies around.

“That way, they kind of come to life,” Baptista said.