The moss-covered bucket, of which the beloved singer wrote, is matched by the green moss of the time stained stone crypt in Laurel Hill Cemetery in San Francisco, where the remains of the printer-poet had lain for half a century.

Over the sandstone tomb, smothered with ivy and climbing rose, fog and wind now sing a sad refrain as if again bidding good-by to the songster who made bucolic scenes of his childhood in Scituate, Mass., a heart picture for all, and whose story of the well and its welcome drink has been translated into all civilized tongues.

Thirty-seven years ago members of the family of the poet removed his body from the tomb, crowded with vines and flowers, like the “deep tangled wildwood” of the poem, had it cremated and took the ashes away.

And the lovers of the memory of the poet, who had worn a path to the last home of him who longed again for the sweet scenes of childhood came no more.

The vines grew thicker and more tangled, the iron grill work of the fence surrounding the tomb rusted with the years. The rock coping started to crumble. Marble facings cracked and neglect laid its careless hand on all as if the sweet song of the poet had echoed for the last time in heart memory.

Crowded near are the graves of early day pioneers now resting in the silent city of the dead. The pioneers who come to found a new empire and a new home in the West, and who now will again be seeking another last home if the removal of the cemeteries is voted at the city elections in November.

Just to the west of the poet’s tomb is the crowded children’s plot with wind blown laurel near it. They, too, will be hustled away when the wreckers and the grave diggers get busy.

“Of late year the souvenir hunters have not been plucking at the ivy over the grave,” William H. Fieldhouse, office manager for the old cemetery said. “There used to be a path, worn in the turf, leading to the grave. But now....”

The poet who sang for the bucket that hung in the well, “the bridge and the rock where the cataract fell,“ died in New York December 9, 1842. In 1864, his son, Selim E. Woodworth, stationed in San Francisco as commander, in the United States Navy, had his father’s body brought to Laurel Hill, for, it was hoped, a lasting resting place. But at the start of the new century, the city passed drastic cemetery regulation ordinances.

His surviving relatives, fearing the poet’s rest would be disturbed, removed the body and preserved its ashes, leaving the tomb, now the sport of winds, in the cemetery to await the wreckers if the removal ordinance is voted.

But for a few months yet the iris and the ivy will nod to the breezes as if in rhythm to the immortal lines:

“How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood... when fond recollection presents them to view....”

For a few months yet visitors may come and muse with bared heads over the vault garlanded with ivy, a spot unlike the “loved spot where my infancy knew.”

San Francisco Chronicle
July 11, 1937