One of the first Maine families of African descent to be buried at Calvary Cemetery reflects on legacy

At the culmination of Black History Month, descendants of one of the first families of African descent to be buried at Calvary Cemetery in South Portland, Maine celebrates their history in Maine.  

John Reginald Spaulding was born in Africa in 1870 and became a citizen of the United States in 1906. He was a faithful parishioner at Sacred Heart Church in Portland until his death in 1962 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery. John had purchased the burial plots in Calvary upon the death of his wife, Mary Ellen Spaulding, in 1913. The family plot is the burial site of three generations of the Spaulding family.

“We are blessed and honored to carry our family's history and their stories for generations to come; that they might know the fundamental values of our legacy. Our future emerges from our past,” John Spaulding’s great granddaughter, Cynthia James, said.  

Family members buried in the plot in addition to Mary Ellen Spaulding include a child Catherine Elizabeth (1920), John Reginald Spaulding (1962), daughter Mary Ellen Spaulding Cummings (1966), and granddaughter Elizabeth Ann Cummings (2018). John Reginald Spaulding's second wife, Charlotte Robinson Spaulding, is buried in Augusta.

The first person of African American descent buried in Calvary Cemetery was Bishop James Augustine Healey in 1900. Healey was the first African American Roman Catholic Bishop in the United States when he was the Bishop of Portland from 1875 to 1900.  

Calvary Cemetery was consecrated on August 8, 1858, by Rt. Rev. David William Bacon, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland. There are an estimated 46,000 people buried in Calvary Cemetery.