Saturday, June 13, 2015 at 11 am at Bridge Street Cemetery

On Saturday, June 13, 2015, the Ward Three Neighborhood Association will sponsor a tour of Bridge Street Cemetery led by local author Susan Stinson. The tour will begin at 11 am at the cemetery entrance on Parsons Street. Ms. Stinson will focus primarily on the oldests parts of the cemetery.

The damaged gravestone at the Bridge Street Cemetery is one example of the cemetery's preservation needs.

The DPW is appointing a city-wide committee to work with Ms. Lyon and the DPW. There will be public forums to gather community input.

When the study is complete, Northampton residents and the city will have rough budgets and recommendations that will allow citizens and the City to understand the options for cemetery restoration. This study can also be used as the basis for further fundraising.

Susan Stinson is the celebrated author of Spider in a Tree, a novel about Northampton in the time of Jonathan Edwards (Small Beer Press, October 2013). Ms. Stinson is the outgoing Forbes Library writer-in-residence. As writer-in-residence, she coordinated the library's popular reading and lecture series Local History/Local Authors from 2010-2015. On May 30, 2015, Ms. Stinson was awarded the Forbes Library Trustees Award for exceptional community service. Ms. Stinson has received the Oustanding Mid-Career Novelist Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. In spring 2014, she was a visiting lecturer at Amherst College.