Is There Somebody Buried in My Front Yard?

Paul at Homeowner's Blog asks, "Is There Somebody Buried In My Front Yard?" The photographic evidence suggests that there might be.

This reminds me of the story of the Philadelphia construction workers who uncovered the bodies of 16 children during a 2004 home renovation. The house had been built on top of the old almshouse burial ground.

Custom-Made Gravestone?

Were 17th- and 18th-century gravestones custom carved or did customers purchase pre-carved blanks and pay for a custom epitaph? This is an important question for anyone who wishes to argue that the iconography of a particular stone is connected with the person buried under it.

The evidence seems to indicate that many stones were custom-made, but many (most?) were pre-carved.

It is easiest to argue that a stone was custom-made when it is of an unusual size/shape, when it displays a portrait of the deceased, or when the iconography is directly related to something mentioned in the text. If a stone is custom-made, there should also be consistency between the hand that carved the words and the iconography.

Thus, there little doubt that the Langley children stone and the Childs children stone are custom-made: they are too large, unusual, and specific to be pre-carved. Similarly, I would wager that the Jonathan Pierpont stone is a custom stone due to the minister-specific iconography and the correspondence between the letterforms and iconography. The stone for Desire Tripp's arm is definitely one-of-a-kind.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is easy to argue that a stone is probably pre-carved when its iconography is standard for a particular workshop, the text does not fit particularly well, or the hand carving the iconography seems different from the hand carving the text.

For example:

The Lee children stone (Phipps Street Cemetery, Charlestown, MA) looks like every other Lamson shop stone carved between 1730 and 1750 and the names of the children are squished into a space that is much too small. To me, this looks like a (rather large) blank that was intended for a single person, but purchased by the Lees for their children.

The Thomas Brown stone (NCBG, Newport, RI) is typical of William Stevens' early work, but the text does not fill the space allotted, suggesting that the border and tympanum carvings may have been done before the epitaph.

On the Sarah Rogers stone (NCBG, Newport, RI), there is a profound disconnect between the style of the borders and the style of the lettering, indicating that the work was divided between two carvers.

Next time: pre-shaped, but not pre-carved

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.

Spotlight on Joseph Nash

Some of the most distinctive gravestones in Western Massachusetts were created by Joseph Nash. Nash was active from the 1720s until the 1740s, carving stones for the dead of Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield, Springfield, and other communities in that section of the Connecticut River Valley.

Chileab [Caleb?] Smith

d. 1733
Hannah Smith
d. 1731

Hadley, MA

Bunker Hill Graves?

According to the Boston Globe, there may be a mass grave in Charlestown containing the remains of British soldiers killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. J.L. Bell at Boston 1775 has more.

Adam Eve

Today's New England name of the day is:

Adam Eve.

I don't know much about Adam Eve other than that he had a wife named Elizabeth who died in 1735 at age 78 and is buried in Watertown, MA. It's kind of tricky to Google for him.