Girl Scout creates a Revolutionary tour

The historic Bloomfield Cemetery, situated between Glen Ridge and Bloomfield, has been brought into the 21st Century with a Girl Scout’s cutting edge project.

Laura Capezio, a recently graduated Mount Saint Dominic Academy senior, has created a self-guided QR tour of the grave sites of a select group of Revolutionary War patriots—individuals who either fought or, in some way, contributed to the war effort.

The project, “Remembering Our Revolutionary War Patriots,” was undertaken by Laura to achieve her Gold Award, the Girl Scout’s highest award. The QR code will link to text which provides the patriot’s name, date of birth and death, a biography and a map of the grave’s location.

“After I finished my Silver Award project, I started to think about a Gold Award,” she said. “The Silver Award was about the American flag.”

Laura, a resident of Cedar Grove, is a member of that township’s Girl Scout Troop 20278. Her troop leader is her mother, Beth, who, as it happened, had applied for entry into the Maj. Joseph Bloomfield Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. To do this, she conferred with its regent, Bonnie Bonnie Sharkey, and destiny took a turn.

Sharkey and the cemetery superintendent, Mary Jones, had been thinking about having a self-guided tour of some sort in the cemetery. When Beth applied to be in the DAR, she and Sharkey got to talking and Sharkey learned that Laura was a Girl Scout interested in finding a Gold Award project, Sharkey told Beth about the self-guided tour idea and asked if Laura could come up with something. She did.

“The tour of the Revolutionary War patriots was the brainchild of Laura,” Sharkey said.

Jones said a tour had been on her mind for several years. She could do dozens of them, she said, with docents. But at the 2023 unveiling of the Revolutionary War cemetery monument, she realized what was needed was a self-guided tour.

“Laura had already done a patriotic project for her Silver Award,” Jones said. “She wanted to take it further. That’s pretty impressive.”

Requiring approval from the Girl Scout Heart of NJ Council, Laura’s proposal had to address sustainability—that the finished project would be physically survivable, and the basis for it. She reasoned that “historical cemeteries, such a Bloomfield Cemetery, often lack modern technology, resulting in the loss of public access to interesting and important information. The main issue is the absence of QR walking tours for Revolutionary War gravesites, including those at Bloomfield Cemetery. This limitation restricts the public’s ability to explore the graves of the Patriots buried there and to learn their remarkable stories.”

Once OK’ed, the proposal took more than 18 months to come to fruition and a considerable amount of research. A booklet of the tour, to be publicly available, cites 17 publications researched. There are 34 documented Revolutionary War patriots interred in the cemetery, a number who are members of families with names still recognizable.

“It was unclear who to research,” Laura said. “I was trying at first doing individuals, but saw that some families were more prominent.”

Although she collected information on all 34 patriots, four families, with multiple patriots, and two individuals, are on the tour. The families are Baldwin, Dodd, Davis and Crane. The individuals are Aury King and Thomas Cadmus.

Once she amassed the research and wrote the histories, Laura had to figure out how to create QR codes so that the information could not be surreptitiously changed later on. She received guidance to do this from Gregory Rasmusson, her history and coding class teacher.

The patriot who impressed her the most, Laura said, was Thomas Cadmus, whose home, on the Washington Street of today, is still a private residence. It was there where “the father of our country” stayed when in the area.

“I didn’t know that someone buried in Bloomfield Cemetery knew George Washington,” she said.

The cemetery will have seven QR posts for scanning. Six will be for the tour, one for the Revolutionary War Monument.

The QR tour was made possible through small grants, cookie sales, assistance from members of VFW Post 493 of Nutley and Laura’s Girl Scout troop. It will be officially unveiled at the Bloomfield Cemetery, on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m., rain or shine.

“I am happy I was able to do this project in the first place,” Laura said.

She will attend the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven this fall to major in Forensic Science.