Thursday, April 8, 2010

Gravestone of the Day: Stephen Larrabee


Stephen Larrabee, 1718, Portland, ME
 HERE LYES ye
BODY OF STEPHEN
LARRABEE AGED
66 YEARS
DIED MARCH
ye 1st 17178

This stone may offer a clue about the interval between burial and the erection of a monument. Whoever bought this stone for Stephen Larrabee of Portland, Maine had to send away to Boston for the stone, which contains an error in the date. It could just be that the carver slipped and carved 1717 instead of 1718, but that error is much easier to make if you are carving in 1720 than in 1718.

Then again, this stone looks very much like others with dates in the 1710s, so who knows (also, Farber says that these stones were carved by John Foster before 1719). I am compiling a dossier of evidence on this question and this is just one minor bit of data.
Edward Sprague, 1715, Malden, MA

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You don't think this has any thing to do with the difference between the Julian/Gregorian calendars where dates between Jan 1 and march 25th were attributed to the year before?

Caitlin GD Hopkins said...

Sure, it could be, but if it is, it is a non-standard way to do it. The hybrid dates look like this and this. John Foster definitely knew how to carve a standard hybrid date — he did it all the time. This doesn't look like those — it looks like a mistake. Or maybe a space issue?