Home for Destitute Children’s graves restored in Vermont

By LISA RATHKE
Associated Press

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Volunteers have restored 51 gravestones of children who lived and died in the late 1800s and early 1900s at the Home for Destitute Children in Vermont’s largest city. The small headstones are in the scenic and historic Lakeview Cemetery. According to University of Vermont professor Meghan Cope, the Home for Destitute Children was formed in the 1860s by some middle-class and wealthy women to serve Vermont children orphaned by the Civil War. She says it grew to serve a much broader population of kids later from families in crisis, such as a parent dying, poverty or neglect. Volunteers from the Vermont Old Cemetery Association and the Howard Center reset and cleaned the stones earlier this month.