MILBRIDGE, Maine — Far from seeing anything morbid about his profession, Everard D. Hall regards his work as providing a personal service with divine oversight.
He also is one of the last practitioners of his particular trade who still does it by hand. Hall, 70, is a gravedigger. He dug his first grave in 1967.
The Milbridge native sees his work as an extension of God’s grace, bringing comfort to people whose loved ones, as he puts it, have been “called home.”
His preferred tools include shovels, a sod cutter and a pickaxe, to name a few. He admits he could work faster with a backhoe or an excavator, but he eschews power equipment that he says are too blunt, messy and impersonal.
“No one does a job like I do. I do it right,” Hall said on a recent morning, sitting in front of a plate of eggs at the Milbridge House restaurant.
By his own estimate, Hall has buried about 2,500 people in eastern Hancock and western Washington counties over the past 48 years, including several relatives.
Not everyone is lucky enough to find their calling. For this reason, Hall feels doubly blessed. He uses his talent to fulfill the days of his life while offering a personal, meaningful coda to those whose days have ended.
As one of the last of his kind, Hall has been around long enough to see his profession fade, then be reborn by trendy funeral services that offer hand-dug graves as “green” burials.
He has been oft-profiled, interviewed and appreciated as a man who seemingly exists outside time.
His view on the matter? It’s about as straightforward as his work.
“I’ve been at it a long time,” he said. “I’ve dug a lot of holes.”
People person
At the Milbridge restaurant, Hall exchanged greetings and comments with a steady stream of familiar faces who came through the front door.
Though occasionally profane, Hall is a people person — and not just for the recently deceased.
“You know, if you cut off your head, you couldn’t talk?” an older man, seeing Hall talking to a reporter, jokingly told him as he walked in.
“I know,” Hall replied, with barely a pause and then a chuckle. “Neither could you.”
Recounting his life experiences, Hall seamlessly passed from one story to the next, peppering references to people with quick asides about which of their relatives he has buried. Many people, he said, have asked him to dig their graves when the time comes.
In the workshop behind his home off Bay View Road he keeps an album that — along with family photographs of his siblings, wife, children and grandchildren — includes many pictures of graves he has dug through the years. Some of the grave photos are taped to a sheet of cardboard with the corresponding person’s obituary pasted to the other side.
“Death doesn’t bother me,” Hall said, standing at a workbench in the small building. Outside, a white cross stood mounted on the front edge of the workshop roof. Long-handled digging tools were propped up inside the door as he leafed through the photo album.
Parked in front of the workshop was Hall’s distinctive red pickup truck. The front edge of a white wooden frame Hall built in the bed of the truck is adorned with three crosses, a yellow flower and miniature gravestones with the phrases “The Digger Hall” and “Country Boy” facing forward. Old tools and other items are fastened to the exterior sides of the frame, as are letters spelling out Hall’s name and “RIP.”
“I’m working for God, and God is working through me,” Hall said. “I’ve always had a strong faith. I’ve got a God-given talent digging graves.”
He said he prays, and sometimes God answers. He has had work come his way when he has run out of money, he said, and once had a casket settle itself into a grave after it had become jammed while being lowered into place. On another occasion, he added, a brief burst of rain moved a small group of people along after they had gathered in a cemetery right where he needed to dig.
“He is always there when I need Him,” Hall said.
The calling
One of 10 children — six boys and four girls — born to Alvin and Marjorie Hall, Everard Hall found his calling gradually.
He started out directly after high school, as many have in Washington County, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He worked part time for a local mason for about five years, including setting grave stones, before he started digging graves part time. Within a few years, other grave diggers in the area retired and turned over their funeral home clients to him, giving him enough work to earn a steady living.
“I was working for three undertakers full time,” Hall said. “That’s how I got into the grave-digging business.”
He is meticulous in his work. A grave is a person’s final resting spot, he said, and it is important to the family of the deceased it be prepared with attention and respect.
While digging a grave recently at Pine Grove Cemetery in Cherryfield, Hall stretched out a tape measure to determine precisely where he would dig and used the broad side of an ax to drive tall wooden stakes into the ground at the corners of the plot. He then used a sod cutter, driving in the edge with his foot, to cut the sod into squares.
When this was done, before he began digging the soil away, he carefully scooped up each sod square with a shovel and gently placed it on a tarp a few feet away. After the casket is interred — usually a day or two later, he said — he carefully will replace the sod squares in reverse order, making sure each one ends up in the cemetery lawn exactly where it had been removed.
“It’s the only way I do a job. You’ve got to show a lot of respect for the family,” Hall said. “A lot of gravediggers, all they care for now is they get the money and get out. There’s no love and no pride in their work. I’d rather stay at the cemetery an hour later and get a compliment than leave early and [have them] say, ‘Well, hell, he made a hell of a mess of that one.’”
Hall does make some exceptions for his hand-powered creed. He uses a gas-powered weed whacker to clear plots before he starts digging and a jackhammer to break apart large rocks too heavy to lift. When it rains, he uses a pump to rid the graves of standing water and, yes, sometimes he gets help from backhoe operators when he is pressed for time.
If digging goes smoothly and the weather cooperates, he can have a grave ready in about five hours. If it doesn’t go smoothly, because of bad weather or difficult digging, he said, it can take several hours per day for several days to get it finished. Spring usually is his busiest time of year, depending on how mild or severe the winter weather had been. This past winter, he said, the heavy snowfall kept him idle for a couple of months.
As he approaches five decades of his demanding job, Hall shows no sign of slowing down, despite the fact that arthritis in his right hip has given him a noticeable limp. He said he always tries to stay busy and, though he is paid several hundred dollars for each grave he digs, he frequently mows lawns and cuts and splits firewood on the side. His doctor, he added, has told him to stay active.
“You can’t set around the house all day,” Hall said. “I do something every day. You’ve got to keep going.”
Hall, who already has his own burial spot picked out in Evergreen Cemetery in Milbridge, said he has given no thought to who might dig his grave, and he doesn’t plan to.
It’ll be out of his hands, then.
He has been asked when he’ll retire, and he doesn’t know that, either. It’ll depend, he said, when the one he serves decides it’s time.
“When the good Lord calls me home,” Hall said.
