By Rocco Colella, Globe Correspondent | July 12, 2007

Behind the Brunswick Zone bowling alley in Lowell, through the grass where a drive-in theater once stood, you can enter the woods through a narrow, brush-filled pathway.

For some, it may just be any woodsy area in Pawtucketville. But for Dracut teacher Rebecca Duda, rejuvenating this spot along Pawtucket Boulevard has become a mission.

Looking closer, past protruding branches and a mossy, leaf-ridden floor, the remnants of smashed headstones clutter the area. Remains of stone pillars where family plots were marked are hidden there. Claypit Cemetery is Dracut's oldest burial ground. It is also forgotten, with more than 20 known residents laid to rest here some 200 years ago, their markers smashed by vandals or buried under brush.

Adding to the web to be unraveled, Pawtucketville was part of Dracut when the burials took place. The land was later annexed to Lowell, but all who are buried there are part of Dracut's past.

"This is more than just cleaning up the cemetery, since there isn't much of a cemetery there anymore," said Duda, an eighth-grade history teacher at Lakeview Junior High School in Dracut. Duda is spearheading the Claypit project, with hopes that she and her team will be able to restore the cemetery.

"We would like to see it not only preserved, but sustained after the re-creation," she said.

Before any cleanup efforts begin, Duda and her team believe research and public outreach should come first.

"There is no sense in cleaning up until we have a commitment from a civic or government group," said W. Dean Eastman, a recently retired Beverly High history teacher and Duda's former instructor. Eastman heads the website primaryresearch.org, which was originally established to post information related to Beverly history, but now is chronicling the cemetery project.

Two students also have joined the project. Eighth-graders Emily Fox and Megan Fawcett began assisting in the research, and will continue into the summer months and beyond.

"I never really liked history before," said Fawcett.

By donning insect repellent to brave the cemetery site in search of headstones, digging through town and census records from the past, and even accompanying Duda to Boston this summer to search church records, Fox and Fawcett went from taking on a little extra school credit to spending weekends unearthing headstones.

Their first assignment remains ongoing: sifting through census records for information on early Dracut settlers who may be interred in Claypit. In addition, there are church, land, and tax records, plus obituaries, to be found and researched. Their discoveries are being chronicled on primaryresearch.org.

While attempting to locate records at Dracut Town Hall, Duda discovered that the town's records do not go back that far.

"The town cannot find the documents," said Duda. "Vital records only go from 1840 onward, even though Dracut became a town in 1701."

Adding to research problems is simply finding out who owns the cemetery. Pawtucketville was part of Dracut until being annexed to Lowell in 1874.

"According to the Lowell assessor, the town of Dracut still owns the cemetery, but according to Dracut, the Lowell assessors can say Dracut owns it because they don't want to have to maintain it," said Duda.

According to a letter from the Lowell assessor's office, Dracut owns the Claypit Cemetery, even though it is in Lowell.

Through research, Duda and her team have come across nine names of people buried in Claypit that were previously unknown.

But the information that has really generated buzz is the nugget of African-American history that has been discovered. While there have been unproven accounts of African-Americans being buried there in unmarked graves, Fox and Fawcett's research turned up clues in the census records.

"This information tells us that there were many African-Americans living in the Pawtucketville area," said Fox. "Blacks and whites lived as neighbors in this community while slavery still existed in the South."

Of the African-Americans buried in Claypit, the most prominent known to date are members of the Lew family. Barzillai Lew was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and the family was well known in Pawtucketville, Duda said. Further research has found that blacks in Dracut helped in the Underground Railroad efforts to help slaves escape to free states from 1810 to 1850.

Duda discovered the cemetery while casually talking with a faculty member one day who introduced her to Bud Paquin of the Dracut Historical Society. After Paquin came to speak to Duda's history class, he brought up the Claypit Cemetery to the teacher as an aside.

"He brought maps and told me it was overgrown and in terrible condition," said Duda.

In 1939, the Elks attempted to take inventory of the 12 remaining headstones on site. In 1961, a history column in the Lowell Sun described the cemetery as "abandoned." In the early 1980s, another Dracut teacher attempted to clean up the area with several students. And in 1992, following teenage vandalism, the Pawtucketville Historical Society and the Dracut Cemetery Department cleared the site.

Paquin, too, attempted to revamp the cemetery, but to no avail.

Now, it's Duda's challenge.

"Symbolically, the headstone is a symbol of people's lives. Research immortalizes these people's everyday lives," said Duda. "People can build upon it."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.