Zetta Mead (died 1807) Returned to New Burial Grounds Cemetery, Greenwich, Connecticut

Zetta Mead's gravestone (left, laying flat) has been returned to New Burial Grounds Association Cemetery next to the Second Congregational Church in Greenwich. 

In the mid-1980s we accidentally discovered the marble gravestone of Zetta Mead -who died in 1807- in the rear of the house where Caroline Mills Smith Mead died in 1910. It was used as a path stone behind that house on Relay Place, Cos Cob. 

How did it get there? We suspect that her marker was a casualty of the collapse of scaffolding around the then-dismantled Second Congregational Church steeple circa 1915. The steeple had been dissembled for the first time. A church committee found it to be in hazardous condition, hence the removal and eventual reassembly of the steeple. 

The scaffolding, however, was in a free-standing state. So, when a windstorm came Easter weekend the scaffolds collapsed into the adjacent cemetery. When he was among the living then-Town Historian William E. Finch, Jr., said that some local residents ran off with some of the broken gravestones. 

See the bottom of this page from Spencer P. Mead's survey of burials in the New Burial Grounds Cemetery. Zetta Mead, wife of Colonel Ebenezer Mead, born January 17, 1777 and died May 7, 1807, is listed here. 

On Monday, July 27, 2015 the Zetta Mead gravestone was removed from the plot in Cos Cob. It has been transferred to a family plot in the New Burial Grounds Cemetery. It has not been ascertained that its new location is precisely where Zetta Mead was buried. 

In the process of relocating Zetta Mead's stone we made another surprising discovery. For more on that go to this link.