NEWRY — One of two mysteries associated with a cemetery along Route 26 in North Newry recently was solved.

A new grave was found dug at the Head of the Tide Cemetery, which is near the Newry and Grafton Township line. It is an old cemetery that dates back to the early 1800s, when Mormon missionaries were baptizing area settlers into the Mormon church.

The problem with the new grave was that no one notified town officials about it.

Newry’s Cemetery Ordinance states that selectmen and the administrative assistant are authorized to supervise care of town cemeteries. Additionally, funeral directors are required to give the administrative assistant 24 hours notice and a burial permit issued by the Board of Health prior to any interment.

At the Aug. 5 selectmen meeting, Newry Administrator Loretta Powers solved the grave mystery when she told the board that Pinette, Dillingham & Lynch Funeral Home and Cremation Services of Lewiston was responsible.

“They had contacted the grave-digger, Albert Nelson, but failed to call the town,” she said. “The town has received the proper paperwork from the grave-digger.”

Powers said selectmen agreed to revise town ordinances to specifically state that the town must be notified prior to the digging of any new graves at town cemeteries.

The other mystery — how the cemetery came to be named “Head of the Tide” when the nearest ocean is 70 miles away — isn’t so easy to solve.

The only body of water it’s near is the Bear River, which flows behind the cemetery. It originates in Grafton Township and empties into the Androscoggin River in Bethel. Several old monuments and slate markers either face the Bear River or Route 26.

Powers said Thursday that she couldn’t recall how Head of the Tide was derived. Neither could Randy Bennett, executive director of the Bethel Historical Society.

People frequently ask him why it has such an odd name.

“There are tidal rivers in Bangor and Wiscasset that I’ve heard of Head of the Tide references to, but the Bear River is too far inland and not a tidal river,” Bennett said.

That’s why he suspects Head of the Tide was a local name.

Longtime Bethel Historical Society member and research volunteer Mary E. Valentine wrote a series of articles about Mormon missionaries in the 1830s for the society’s newsletter, “The Courier.” The series, published from 2005 through 2008, was titled “Western Maine Saints.”

As an editor’s note in Volume 29, No. 1, Valentine wrote: “The southern portion of present-day Newry on the Sunday and Bear rivers was chartered as a town in 1805; the northern part of the town, along Bear River from the Branch Road at North Newry to the Grafton line, was part of Andover West Surplus, an unorganized territory, until 1836 when the settlers petitioned the Maine Legislature to allow them to join the town of Newry.

“This upper part of the ‘Bear River settlement’ was also called by some, ‘Head O’ Tide’ or ‘Head of the Tide’ — hence the name that was long applied to the first school in the area and to the cemetery nearest North Newry.”

In March of 1837, a large portion of Andover West Surplus became part of Newry, Valentine wrote. At a Newry town meeting in March 1854, the three selectmen were authorized to pick land for a burial ground in the former Andover West Surplus.

Valentine wrote that it seemed likely they would have chosen a burial ground where there were already graves. The Head O’ Tide Cemetery, she said, is probably on land that was part of David Sessions’ 400-acre farm in the 1820s and 1830s.

It’s believed that Sessions buried his parents and four children, who died of typhus and whooping cough, in the family plot on the farm. In July 1834, Sessions’ wife, Patty (Bartlett), was the first family member baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Valentine said that N.S. Baker, Newry’s superintendent of schools in the 1890s, wrote a letter about Newry’s past to The Bethel News that was published on Aug. 5, 1896. He said, “Squire Paine began at the Tides.”

Valentine said Daniel Paine’s house was a short distance north of the Sessions home and that, possibly, a Paine family member, looking at the water from spring snow melt that poured down Wight’s Brook into Bear River, might have been reminded of a tidal bore.

She said the Head of the Tide name was mentioned in Perrigrine Sessions’ missionary diary of Oct. 1, 1839, when he went to “the head of the tide” and preached to Paine’s school house.

Bennett said Head of the Tide could also be a misreading of a name, much like Monkey Brook, a Sunday River tributary, is a misreading of Monday Brook. Or it could be that the headwaters of the Bear River were believed to be in Newry and thus given the name, Bennett said.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know how it was named ‘Head of the Tide,'” he said. “But it would be interesting to know how far back that goes.”

He said the old Head of the Tide School building was moved many miles away several years ago to Newry Corner, where Routes 2 and 26 meet near the Bear River Cabins. It was later demolished.

Bennett said his best guess is that like other Maine towns that were named after countries and European cities, such as Mexico, Denmark, Moscow and China, Head of the Tide was a name that was meant to attach significance to a town that wasn’t really all that significant.

“It’s an interesting part of our folk history that we’ll probably never know, but people will keep making guesses,” Bennett said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com