Durant Cemetery

Durant Cemetery was named not for the original land donors, Elihu Coburn and Col. John Stone, but for later donor, J. T. Durant's second wife, Julia. The first Mrs. Durant, Sarah, died in 1872 at age 56. Julia Dean, Durant's second wife, died in 1894, the same year he gave land to the town to extend the cemetery. Julia was also 56 when she died; J. T. Durant died in 1902 at age 87. At the time he deeded the land to the town, he stipulated that the land be divided into burial lots equal to the price of the land. He set up the "Julia D. Durant Cemetery Fund," and directed that funds from the sale of the lots was to be kept there and the interest and income be used to keep the cemetery in repair at all times.

This cemetery has a sloping hillside stretching in a graceful curve towards the Winooski River along its eastern border. Jennie Gould Bruce, with her husband and neighbors in Lower Cabot, made this natural amphitheater into a lovely sunken garden. They installed granite slabs for steps down the bank and took great pride in planting flowers and shrubs to landscape the area. On August 20, 1931, the "Jennie Gould Bruce Memorial Garden" was dedicated.

Commonly known as "the sunken garden," it was a lovely spot for community gatherings, vesper services, Old Home Week gatherings, or private meditation. While Durant Cemetery was kept in reasonably good shape, the sunken garden proved to be more care than people had time to give it, and after Budd and Jennie Bruce died in 1953 and 1954 respectively, it became overgrown, its beauty lost.

Velma Urban Smith became sexton in 1993, and that year the Jennie Gould Bruce Memorial Garden was replanted and refurbished, and was rededicated on August 22, 1993.