About

History.

On February 28, 2020, the Baldwin Hill Conservation Cemetery was incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)(13) corporation in the State of Maine.

The Baldwin Cemetery Corporation is officially known as The Baldwin Hill Conservation Burial Ground (BHCBG) but goes colloquially by Baldwin Hill Conservation Cemetery (BHCC) or Baldwin Hill Cemetery. The BHCBG’s ten-acre burial ground is adjacent to The Kennebec Land Trust’s (KLT’s) eighty-acre Baldwin Hill Conservation Area.

KLT purchased the ninty-acre property, including what is now the burial ground, from the Sturtevant family in 2019, intending to locate a conservation burial ground on the property. Ten acres was deeded to the BHCBG Corporation, while the remaining eighty acres are permanently protected by KLT.

Mission.

The Baldwin Cemetery seeks to provide ecologically sound burial for people of all traditions and to serve as a model of green burial practices in Maine and beyond.

As KLT developed this initiative, it became apparent that conservation burial is traditional burial—a practice that has been followed for thousands of years. The use of chemical embalming fluids and energy-intensive cement vaults is relatively new, and our society is still coming to terms with the environmental impacts of these modern burial practices.

The burial practices employed at Baldwin Hill Cemetery rely on the resiliency of the land and the processes of life and death that contribute to that resilience.

Natural or ‘green’ burial is a way of caring for the dead that minimizes environmental impacts and embraces the biological processes of decomposition at the end-of-life. Natural burial may be associated with practices that aid in the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and/or preservation of habitat. Natural and green burial necessitates the use of non-toxic and biodegradable materials such as caskets, shrouds, and urns, in place of conventional embalming fluids, concrete vaults, and elaborate caskets made of synthetic or exotic materials.

As a conservation cemetery Baldwin Hill, through its partnership with KLT, seeks to leverage natural burial practices as a tool for conservation— both locally and as a possible model for others.