The present level of the Gully road is much lower than it was even fifty years ago, and there is a legend that one hundred and fifty years ago a great freshet cut out large quantities of earth here, but the higher level could hardly have been of long duration, for Mrs. Gibbs recalls that a number of years ago, while workmen were digging a trench, possibly for the sewer, they brought up what are thought to have been Indian relics from a depth of twelve feet or more. Mr. Gibbs’s brother was passing at the moment of discovery and tried to purchase the find from the man in charge, as he regarded it of considerable ethnological value, but the contractor refused to sell, and when Mr. Gibbs and his brother returned to the spot the men had gone and their discovery with them, and to-day the exact character of the find is not known. Other Indian finds in this immediate neighborhood are a stone mortar and pestle and many arrow points on the Gibbs place. On the Sandford place, just above, a stone mortar hollowed out of a heavy block long stood by the well. This was kept filled with water for the chickens to drink from. When the place was regraded this stone disappeared, it having been probably buried.
(Since the above was put in type I have found one of the laborers who was employed in building the sewer through the Gully road. He tells me that this was about fourteen years ago, that the find occurred just east of the entrance to the Gibbs place on the north edge of the road, and consisted of four or five Indian skeletons with many stone hammers, arrow points, etc. My informant is under the impression that the burial place was extensive and only partially uncovered.)
From the fact that Indians would hardly dig to any such depth as indicated above, it is fair to presume that the filling in may have been comparatively recent; possibly some great storm had washed masses of earth down into the gully.
The Gully road is now well paved and lighted and much affected by that brazen highwayman the automobile, but there was a time when it was a dark and lonesome place where no honest man desired to be caught after dark; where it is said smugglers filed by during the silent watches of the night, the deserted river bank here being a favorite rendezvous for those whose deeds were evil.
OLD MOLL DE GROW.
Sixty years or so ago a stone wall ran from the bend of the Gully road, near the river diagonally to Belleville avenue, across the property now occupied by the cemetery. Beside this stone wall was buried the first person interred on the site of the cemetery—a noted witch, old Moll DeGrow, the fear of whose shade lent greatly to the terrors of the Gully seventy-five years ago.
This witch was used by the elders as a bugaboo to keep the children indoors after dark, and she appears to have been eminently useful and successful in this capacity. The Gully road was as black as a black hat on a moonless night, and one who ventured abroad at such a time never could tell when he or she might be grabbed by the powers of darkness. During the long Winter evenings these farmer and fisher folk were wont to amuse and scare themselves, as well as the children, by relating all manner of ghostly experiences. Mrs. Henry Davis recalls how, as a child, she used to crawl up to bed so terrified after an evening of witch stories that she could hardly move, her one thought being to get under the bed clothes as quickly as possible, where she would all but smother.
Under such circumstances the ghost of a witch was a powerful combination for evil, and particularly so when it was such a witch as old Moll, who was so much a terror to the neighborhood that there was talk of burning her in order to rid the community of her undesirable presence, but fortunately she died before this feeling culminated in a tragedy. Mrs. Henry Davis well remembers hearing her mother (a former Miss King) tell this as a fact.
BODY SNATCHING.
In the early days of the cemetery, when it was inclosed by a high wooden fence, there was considerable talk of body-snatching, and one of the men in charge of the grounds was strongly suspected.