Gravestone of the Day: Dyer Family

Dyer Family, 1786-1837, Plymouth, MA

Cap. CHARLES DYER,

died at Sea, March

1786; aged 46 yr.s.

BETHIAH, his wife

died June 8, 1837;

aged 87 yr.s.

Their son CHARLES,

died May 7, 1822:

aged 46 yr.s.

Age at Death

It's common knowledge that children under the age of 5 suffered terrible mortality rates in the 18th and 19th centuries. Recently, I have been wondering whether infants were commemorated with gravestones at a rate proportionate with the frequency of their deaths. I'm still not sure whether they were, but I have been crunching some numbers.

Fun Fact of the Day

In 1790, 84 of the 573 households in Plymouth, MA were headed by women. That's 14.66%.

Three households (.52%) were headed by black men (Cato Howe, Prince Goodwin, and Plato Turner).

Widows of Plymouth

While perusing the Plymouth epitaphs, I found several gravestones dedicated to women who outlived their husbands by several decades. I suppose many towns may have had elderly widows, but I can't help but wonder whether the combination of men dying young and women never remarrying is more common in maritime communities. I won't be able to answer that comparative question until I have documented several other cemeteries, but I can look at a few examples of Plymouth's long-term widows:

Susannar Burgess

I apologize for the dearth of substantive posts lately — it's that time of the semester. Between commenting on drafts for increasingly panicked students, navigating holiday obligations, and trying to get a bit of my own work done, I haven't been giving this blog as much attention as I would like. Hopefully, I'll have some down time over break to recommit myself.

In the meantime, here's another fun entry from Benjamin Drew's transcriptions of Plymouth, MA epitaphs:

See also Annar, Marther, Prissilar, etc.

Autumn: Season of Death?

Over the past few weeks, I've been compiling a database based on Benjamin Drew's transcriptions of Plymouth epitaphs. Hopefully, when I'm done, I will be able to quantify some of the patterns that I have observed anecdotally.

I am nowhere near done with this work, but I took a little break today to run some early statistics. One of the patterns I noticed as I was entering the data was that more people seemed to die in the autumn than in the summer. A graph of the month of death for the first 1,400 individuals in my database showed that there was a noticeable pattern:

There seems to have been a dip in the death rate during the late spring and summer and a peak in the early autumn. I will have to do more detailed analysis when I am done entering all of the data (only 1,500 gravestones to go!). After seeing this overall pattern, I will want to break the death months down by age, decade, gender, etc. I suspect that the month has less of an effect on babies who die in the first month after birth and adults ages 15-50, but may have a pronounced influence on those most susceptible to epidemics: young children (age 2 months-5 years) and the elderly.

We'll see.

Consort of Temperance Atwood

A while back, I highlighted the epitaphs carved by Obadiah Wheeler in which he identifies men as husbands to their wives.

This example from Plymouth, MA is not quite the same thing, but it is similar: William Atwood is identified as the "Consort of Temperance Atwood."

Since it is so rare to see an adult, white man identified in terms of his relationship with another person, I wonder whether this may say something about the position of women in maritime communities. Historians have long recognized that port towns tend to have a disproportionate number of female-headed households due to the long and frequent absences of male mariners. Is it possible that whoever commissioned this epitaph was accustomed to treating Temperance Atwood as the head of the Atwood household?

Also, I would name a hypothetical child "Temperance" if Pete would let me. It's a good twin name for "Patience."

Names of the Day

Zabdiel and Ruth Sampson of Plymouth, MA were admirers of 17th-century republican philosophy. I know this because they named their sons

Milton Sampson

and

Algernon Sidney Sampson.

This gravestone may no longer exist — it was in bad shape when Benjamin Drew recorded its epitaph in the 1880s.

Name of the Day

For my novel:

Mr. Quintin Crymble

via Benjamin Drew's Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts

see also:
Miss Fanny Forward
Captain William Wanton

Snarkfest

Much to my surprise, I have found Benjamin Drew's transcriptions of the Plymouth epitaphs to be delightful reading. Besides the epitaphs themselves, Drew adds his own snarky little comments here and there. Here is one of my favorites:

First Person Gravestone

No, I don't mean that the epitaph speaks in the voice of the deceased. In this case, the gravestone itself speaks in the first person:

Rachel Cotton

d. 1808

Plymouth, MA

I

am erected

by

Josiah Cotton Esqr

in remembrance

of Rachel

his pious and Virtuous

Wife,

who died Januy 17th 1808

aged 50 years.

In belief of Christianity I lived,

In hope of a glorious Resurrection I died.

By Strangers Honored and By Strangers Mourned

In her book, This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that 19th-cntury Americans spent a lot of time worrying about the disruption of the "good death" during the Civil War. One of their principal concerns was that men regularly died far from home, away from the (often female) family members who should have witnessed their last words, observed the evidence of their salvation, and performed proper mortuary rituals. In many cases, nurses, doctors, and local civilians stood in for absent family members, performing the duties that mothers, wives, and sisters could not.

This same concern occupied the minds of maritime families in earlier decades. When men died at sea or in foreign ports, their family members hoped that they had been attended in their last moments and sometimes imagined attendants into being.

A good example of this concern can be found on a cenotaph in Plymouth, MA. Isaac Wethrell was 19 years old when he died in "Martinico" in January of 1803; his brother William was 22 when he died in St. Thomas two months later. The Wethrell brothers' parents commissioned a single cenotaph for their sons, choosing to honor them with a quotation from Alexander Pope:

By foreign hands, thy dying eyes were closd

By foreign hands, thy decent limbs composd

By foreign hands, they humble grave adornd

By strangers honoured, and by strangers mournd

Erected

to perpetuate the memory

of two sons

of Thomas & Sarah Wethrell

who died in the West Indies.

William Wethrell

Decd at St Thomas

March 23d 1803

Aged 22 years.

Isaac Wethrell

Decd at Martinico

January 23d 1803

Aged 19 years.

By foreign hands, thy dying eyes were closd

By foreign hands, thy decent limbs composd

By foreign hands, they humble grave adornd

By strangers honoured, and by strangers mournd

Harbor View

As I stood on Burial Hill in Plymouth the other day, it occurred to me that this hill would have offered the best vantage point for viewing the harbor before the trees got so tall. The Pilgrims built their first fort on this site in 1621 and I can only imagine that they chose it for the harbor view. They probably cleared nearby trees for materials and visibility.

If 18th- and 19th-century residents of Plymouth wanted to watch ships depart, they probably stood here, among the gravestones. What an auspicious beginning for Plymouth seamen's voyages.

Elaborate Urn

Sometimes, the urns on 19th-century gravestones are embellished with delicate details — initials, fronds, garlands, and, very rarely, soul effigies.

This teeny, vestigial soul effigy is about an inch tall. It is very rare to find soul effigies on gravestones carved after 1820 unless the carver was specifically trying to replicate an outdated style.

Capt. Atwood Drew

d. 1823

Plymouth, MA

National Monument to the Forefathers

Cross-posted from American Creation. Reprinted here lest I be accused of being soft on New England's cherished mythologies.

I wanted to follow up on Lindsey's interesting post regarding the place of Plymouth in American memory.

In the video she posted, the commentators are sitting in front of the impressive monument known as the National Monument to the Forefathers (photo via Wikipedia). This memorial, which historian James O'Gorman called, "one of the more lugubrious deposits of mid-nineteenth-century American ideals," was erected by the Pilgrim Society in the 1880s (planning began in the 1850s, but things got off track during the Civil War). The monument features a 36-foot tall granite colossus titled, Faith, surrounded by smaller (15-foot) allegorical statues depicting Liberty, Education, Law, and Morality, as well as several relief panels.

This statue is important because it reminds us that much of what we "know" about the Plymouth colonists and their role in founding the country comes from 19th-century efforts to recapture a usable past, not from rigorous historical investigations into the early 17th century. In the mid 19th century, New Englanders were busy fighting a sectional conflict for supremacy over the meaning of America, and one of the best weapons they had in their arsenal was the argument that the Pilgrims founded America on Christian principles. By ignoring those sordid mercenaries in Jamestown and exalting the Pilgrims as beacons of both religious piety and democracy, they strengthened their claim to the legacy of the forefathers, at the same time denying the legitimacy of Southern claims that the spirit of '76 lived on in the South.

This statue is a concrete (granite, actually ;)) expression of 19th-century interpretations of 17th-century history. Imagine what a monumental history of New England would have looked like if authored by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This is it.

The Victorian interpretation of 17th-century American history is still very much with us (it's even on the citizenship exam). I'll bet the average American "knows" 10x more about Plymouth than about any other 17th-century colony and thinks that the Pilgrims profoundly influenced our nation's democratic and religious institutions when they did nothing of the sort. The Mayflower Compact was not a principled clarion call to democracy. The Pilgrims were not big fans of religious toleration (as the intro video at Plimoth Plantation helpfully points out) and held no appreciable influence over any of their contemporaries, they didn't even influence Massachusetts' Congregational practices. Christianity was a major factor in English colonization, but not in the way 19th-c New Englanders thought.

For more on this monument, I recommend O'Gorman's "The Colossus of Plymouth," in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1995) and James Deetz' The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (2000).

Puritan Names

Honorable mention in the 17th-century naming Olympics goes to:

Godbert Godbertson!

Godbertson, a hatter, died in Plymouth Colony in 1633.
see Gloria Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land, pg. 78.

Update:
On page 97, Main presents the story of the Rev. Justus Forward of Belchertown (Yale class of 1754), who misses out on the laurels only because he was born in the 18th century.

Update II:
I've changed my mind. After a few hours' consideration, I have decided that Godbert Godbertson is actually an even better Puritan name than Humiliation Scratcher. Not only am I incapable of reading or saying "Godbert Godbertson" without cackling, I think that the name cuts through the half-assed religiosity of naming your kid "Thankful" or "Hopestill" or "Hatevil" and goes straight for the gold. In addition, Godbert Godbertson is the perfect 17th-century counterpart to Benjamin H. Grumbles, Shakesville's Gilded Age correspondent.

So, congratulations, Godbert, and our condolences to Humiliation Scratcher, who will no doubt take his demotion in stride.

Times of Their Lives

This is fun. I can't resist adding one of my books from last week:

The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony
by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz (2000):

A variety of punishments were given, ranging from fines between five and forty shillings to, less frequently, being set in the stocks or whipped, particularly for repeat offenses. The first case documented for alcohol abuse, or being "drink drunk," in the court records is that brought against John Holmes, who later became the messenger of the court for the government, on April 1, 1633. He was "censured for drunkenness to sit in the stocks, & amerced in twenty shillings fine.

On second thought, these little snippets of my readings may lead me to question what I am doing with my life . . .