A Miner’s Family - Michael Gard

In Old St. Bridget’s Cemetery, located between the Public Library and the Cheshire Pizza Plaza (because the Cheshire Pizza building was the original St. Bridget’s Church), there are several interesting headstones and monuments. One particularly notable monument is the one for the Gard family.

It shows that both Michael and his wife, Catharine, were born in Ireland.  Michael was born around 1810 and Catharine around 1822. This is fairly standard gravestone information. What is not “standard” is the long list of young children that Michael and Catharine lost. This list extends to two sides of the monument and includes seven children. Most notably, four of these children died in 1866 and two died on the same day. Naturally, this begs the question of what could have caused such an unfathomable loss. Disease? Fire?

In fact, a 1975 article in The Cheshire Herald titled “Tragic Deaths” notes that one of the Gard children died of “inflammation of the brain”, while two other deaths were the result of “cerebro spinal meningitis” and the fourth child died of an unknown cause.

According to “Dr. Google,” meningitis is the inflammation of the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It is usually caused by infection. It can be fatal and requires immediate medical care. Meningitis can be caused by several species of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites.  Which of these possibilities may have been the cause of the Gard children’s deaths?

As it turns out, we know that Michael Gard was a miner at the Jinny Hill Barite Mine because the book “Old Historic Homes of Cheshire” (published in 1893) lists him as one of four miners trapped in a collapse of that mine in 1850, which itself is unusual because the Irish miners typically worked above ground. In fact, Federal Census records for 1850, 1860, and 1870 list his occupation as “Miner,” with the added note in 1870 that he owned real estate valued at $1500 (which equates to over $36,000 in 2025). Is it possible that some germ hitched a ride home from the mine on Michael’s clothing in 1866 and infected the children? We may never know.

However, the good news is that Catharine’s 1892 obituary mentions four surviving children: John, William, Joseph, and Mrs. George M. Egan (nee Mary Gard). Mary’s husband, George Egan, was Chief of Police in Waterbury from 1884 to his retirement in 1905. Joseph was the manager of F. H. Kalbfleisch Chemical Company of Waterbury.

Meanwhile, William, who now spelled his last name “Garde”, graduated from Cheshire Academy and became the well-known proprietor of hotels in New Haven and Hartford. On June 1, 1894, he opened the Hotel Garde in New Haven, at Columbus Avenue and Meadow Street, with just 27 rooms. Due to its reputation and demand, it was expanded over the years to contain 274 rooms, Personal health issues forced him to sell that hotel in 1903. When his health improved, he opened the Hartford Hotel Garde, on the corner of Asylum and High Streets, on May 23, 1906. Nine months later, on January 28, 1907, he died at his Hartford hotel following a 10-week long illness.