Veterans of the American Revolution are buried in all but one of Agawam’s six historic cemeteries.
Maple Grove Cemetery is located on Southwick Street at Johnson Corner in the Feeding Hills section of town. The small neighborhood cemetery was established in 1829, and among the approximately 150 “graves of many of Feeding Hill’s founding and prominent families,” are two Revolutionary War veterans: Abel Griswold and Henry Hedges.
Griswold was a resident of Windsor, Connecticut when “he enlisted, May 1, 1776, under Lt. George Griswold, served one year as a private in Capt. Osias Pettibone’s Co., Col. Andrew Ward’s Rgt. and was in a skirmish in New Jersey. It is also stated that he served two years and six months under Capt. Noah Phelps in the Connecticut Troops.”
Griswold moved to Feeding Hills around 1803 and died in 1843.
Henry Hedges was a Middletown, Connecticut native who later resided in Dalton, Massachusetts before moving to Feeding Hills with his family in the mid 1830s.
A letter from Middletown neighbor Elijah Roberts in the Revolutionary War Pension Files states Hedges served in New York: in 1776 under Capt. Stephen Hubbard; and in 1777 under Capt. Jabez Brooks in Col. Comfort Sage’s Regimen.; and in Connecticut in 1779, under Capt. Joseph Dart, and later, Gen. Ward.
Hedges died in 1841. His grandson, Henry E., was a veteran of the Civil War, and is buried in Feeding Hills’ Springfield Street Cemetery.
The last burial in Maple Grove cemetery was in 1982.
