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Norwalk Hour

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Following his
passion for history

By John H. Palmer

Hour Correspondent

You can learn a lot from a dead guy.

Just ask David Westmoreland, who spends a good amount of time studying the lives of people buried in Norwalk's cemeteries.

It sounds creepier than it really is. Westmoreland, who by trade beautifies the world as a landscape architect, is also a cemetery preservationist volunteering his time to maintain and preserve some of the city's oldest resting grounds.

"To me it's a peaceful landscape, like a park," he said, as he stood among the gravestones at Rowayton Union Cemetery recently. "You can get a hint of the lives of different people from a different time."

The 52-year-old Westmoreland sings a different tune about cemeteries than most people, who may choose to steer clear of them, but he sees burying grounds as more of a history book than a creepy place.

His current position as the president of Norwalk's Historical Society has him advocating for the preservation of burial grounds that go back to Norwalk's earliest days. He takes care of five cemeteries in town, including Brookside, St. Paul's, Pine Island, Mill Hill, and Kellogg-Comstock.

He can tell you a lot about the people who lived in Norwalk just by looking at their gravestone. Early residents used tombstones as sort of a work of art to describe someone's life and to send messages. In colonial times, Puritanical religion influenced residents at a time when lives were short and life was about survival. Many tombstones were inscribed with somber epitaphs and dark symbols such as a skull with wings reminding people to live good lives while they had it.

"You can see how attitudes toward death changed over time," he said. "The Puritans wanted this to be a scary place."

In Victorian times, which gave rise to the middle class, people had more money and began to memorialize people with doves, which symbolized purity, and angels and cherubs with wings. A broken column usually indicated a person who died young.

"Being successful in life was indicative of how successful you would be in death," he said. "People started to memorialize each other, rather than say 'here lies the body, he's gone'."

Unfortunately, the sands of time have affected some of the tombstones, which go back as far as the 17th century. Many old tombstones were made from beautiful marble, slate and brownstone, and the calcium in them has been worn down and cracked over time by rains and fungus. Many times, Westmoreland can be found with volunteers in a graveyard, picking up knocked-over stones, or fixing cracked ones with epoxy and mortar.

"I never really thought of graveyards as a creepy place because I grew up traipsing around them," he said. "My parents were really big into genealogy so we were always looking to see if we could find relatives."

Born outside Houston, Texas, in 1959, Westmoreland grew up the son of a schoolteacher, and an electrical engineer for NASA who helped get the moon landings and the Space Shuttle off the ground.

In 1981, he graduated attended Baylor University in Waco with a degree in computer science during the advent of the personal computer and its operating software. For 22 years, Westmoreland worked for Continental and American Airlines, helping improve technology for automated services that we take for granted today, such as curbside check-in and automated ticketing.

"It was fun and you got to fly for free," he said. "Airlines were looking to become much more efficient. A couple of cents per passenger saved can mean millions of dollars across the board."

After the first Gulf War in 1991, Westmoreland said the "Glamorous Airline Age" was over, and he decided to do something else. He moved to Melville, Long Island, to take a job with Arrow Electronics, a firm that specialized in computer semiconductors, where he eventually became Chief Information Officer with a part in buying 55 companies around the world. Suddenly traveling wasn't so much fun.

"I was literally on a plane to different continent every week," he said.

In 2001, after 9/11 hit, he decided to rethink his life and what he wanted to do with it. He recalls thinking about his childhood, taking care of gardens that his family kept at their home in Texas.

"I worked outside, I set my own hours, and it was all cash," he said. "When I thought about what was the road not taken, my favorite job was taking care of properties and mowing lawns."

At the same time, he had a house on Fire Island, and his neighbor happened to be Mike Mushak, a landscape architect from South Norwalk. Mushak -- who later became Westmoreland's life and business partner, inspired him to go back to school. He enrolled in a program at Cornell, and it was during an archaeology class there that his path turned to the history of cemeteries.

He took a class with a former archaeologist for New York City, and some of the tombstones she mentioned reminded him of some he saw at St. Paul's Church on the Green in Norwalk. He eventually wrote his thesis on the cemetery there, and spent summers from 2003 to 2006 restoring some of the tombstones there.

"I had no earthly idea 10 years ago that I'd be in Norwalk, working in cemeteries as a hobby," he said. "I spent so many years on an airplane that I never got the chance to be rooted in my community. I know so much about the people who have lived here, even though I have no relatives here."

Today, he and Mike run their own landscape architect firm called TulipTree Site Design, working on high-end landscapes.

They do a lot of entertaining at their home in Golden Hill, which happens to be an old Victorian built in 1891 that was the former home of Henry B. Lockwood, a SoNo businessman known for his factory turning out doorknobs and other hardware. Westmoreland also is a classic car buff, and tools around town in one of his two restored 60s-model convertible Ford Mustangs.

"It's a throwback to my first car," he said.