Burial Grounds Of Plymouth Colony - A Scituate Historical Society Presentation

Well, thank you all very much for coming. Yeah, as I mentioned, I was here a couple months ago talking about pirates tonight. I'm talking about cemeteries and graveyards. Invite me back in the spring to talk martinis. They are the three favorite things in the world. We're on a roll, but I've been researching, lecturing, planning exhibits, and writing about cemeteries and cemeteries for about 25 years, around the same time I started seriously researching and studying pirates. Everything is related to the colonial period, which is growing. Around here I grew up in Pembroke and every time my friends and I walked downtown, you know, I knew something about us or something, we always walked through the central cemetery, the wonderful old cemetery, the newer section, of course, they were kids who They were trying to scare. each other who's creepy, you know, or let's say hello to our friend Harry Woods, the old Tin Pan Alley songwriter is buried right in the middle of the cemetery, but once I started as a curator, research writer, and educator of colonial history In the colonial period I found that cemeteries were attracting more and more of my attention and a lot of years ago, probably about 25 years ago, I led my first tour of a cemetery in Burial Hill and I did so while talking to some people beforehand and I had been there one day making some notes, so it was a very hot July day, you know, brilliantly sunny, ninety percent humidity and some tourists had walked up so far Burial Hill, it's a steep slope in Plymouth. and they saw me a couple of times, so they came over and finally asked me: do you know how many miles Standish is buried?

So I pointed towards Duxbury and then they asked me, "Okay, and they said, well, do you know where John Alden is buried?" Again I pointed towards the Duxburys and they seemed very disappointed, so over the years I began to research colonial funeral customs and, in particular, the places where pilgrims were buried. I exhibited at the Pogrom Museum a few years ago, where I used to be the curator of pilgrim

burial

sites. I tried to find where the first 250 people from the first four ships ended up buried. There are only three original headstones for all those people and for most of them you have a pretty good idea, but for a good 30 there is simply no explanation for where they ended up buried, which is why the 17th century Plymouth Colony cemeteries have attracted my attention.

Pay attention and tonight what I am going to do is explain to you some of the concepts of cemeteries. fascinating subject and you see here, you know, the typical winged skull that actually comes from the tombstone of the elder Thomas Cushman at Hill's

burial

. Elder Cushman's stone is dated and he died in 1691. He was the second ruling elder of the church in Plymouth, but in the church. The records say that in 1715, the members of the congregation made a fund, a contribution to pay for some tombstones to be erected over the old man's grave, almost a quarter of a century after his death, they finally erected some tombstones, now we will see . that for the 17th century Plymouth settlers there are probably only about 30 tombstones carved with initials and dates from the colonial period of the Plymouth Colony period 1692 before 1692, so to start with the Plymouth Colony, our former

colony

here founded in 1620, geographically includes the present.

The counties around Barnstable in Cape Plymouth County without hall and Hingham were Mass Bay Bristol County, which included in the 17th century the towns of East Providence. Should say Barrington, not Parrington Warren Bristol Tiverton Little Compton on the eastern half of Pawtucket and Plymouth. The

colony

existed as a separate colony for 72 years until, as I like to say, we were ruthlessly annexed to Massachusetts Bay by the Charter of 1692. 19 towns were founded in the colony and you can see that Plymouth is obviously the first . sort of an explosion of cities in the late 1630s with one situation leading the way here. 1636, you get Duxbury Taunton is the first inner city sandwich bond stable, Yarmouth on the Cape and in the 1640s it flows down a bit, you get Marshfield Rehoboth and Easton again. the Cape, then the other interiors that really taper off in the 50's and 60's Bridgewater Middleboro and Dartmouth and Swansea and then Bristol Rhode Island little Compton Freetown Falmouth and Rochester the eastern half of those eastern halves of the cities in the eastern part of the Bay of Narragansett that are now part of Rhode Island, were first part of the Plymouth Colony and then of Massachusetts Bay until 1747, which is why we have a Bristol County.

Massachusetts without a city of Bristol. Taunton is a county town, but originally it was Bristol, so this is the geographical area of ​​the former colony and in the 17th century English settlers lived alongside many Native American members of Wampanoag Massachusetts, other groups were everywhere and Even in the 18th century there are records of native peoples who continued a traditional way of a semi-migratory species of life moving towards the ocean or ponds and some moving to the most secluded areas in winter and their funeral customs actually They are quite similar to European customs. Roger Williams wrote in His Key to the Language of America in 1643 that when they describe someone in mourning the term is Sequoia TOI he is in black, which means they paint themselves.

The natives would paint themselves with black soot when they were in mourning and also when they buried people they would bury the body in a sort of curled up position facing west. the body would be covered in paints and colors such as ocher, personal objects would be buried with them, bows and arrows, commercial goods and other ornaments covered with reed mats and always facing southwest. Now this is a clear way to identify a native grave rather than an English one. In European tombs, the bodies were always placed upright, but the natives curled them up almost as if in a fetal position, a kind of symbolic return to the womb.

In 1832, in what is now Fall River, several Indian burials and the famous skeleton in Armor were discovered. It was only there for about eleven years or so before it was destroyed in a fire, they found the remains of a body rolled up in that position, but it was covered with pieces of metal everywhere, so there was a lot of speculation in the century XIX perhaps. He was a Viking, maybe he was one of the first explorers buried here, almost certainly he was a native person, they had used trade goods, so if the natives bought a brass pot, they wouldn't necessarily use it as a pot, they could cut it up. and They used it for personal adornment when they buried the body, but it is a fascinating case and is a well-documented example of one of these more elaborate burials for the natives.

Burroughs Hill in Warren Rhode Island was an incredible cemetery from the 17th century contact period. It was excavated in 1911. They are about to pass a train and level the entire area for, you know, a public park. The remains of 42 tombs were discovered. The human remains were taken away and all the pieces. Thousands of pieces. Goods such as beads, pieces of metal, were found on the market. native pottery, reeds, scraps of cloth, English cloth, as well as parts of famous muskets, bottles and small brass rings that were given by the Jesuits in French Canada and Quebec and transmitted through native channels until reaching here and people were buried with some masses, so this beautiful sandstone pipe was placed with this effigy of what I think is a bear on the end, beautiful, from 1815 to 18 inches long, incredible, since all these have since been studied, but have been reassembled. the natives and last year many of these pieces were reburied along with the human remains that were found and there is now a monument on Barr Hill for the masses, so it is quite plausible that the masses are the great session of The Wampanoag is buried in that area, but most of the pieces were documented, so we have the record of them, photographs of the pieces, but now they have been returned to the natives and buried native cemeteries can be found and have been found in everywhere.

Today we are much more understanding of the discovery of cemeteries of native peoples in the 19th, 20th, 20th century, it was not unusual to unearth remains, but on display, but now they have mostly been returned, this is the quote from the called Wampanoag royal burial. There's nothing really real about it, it's certainly a Wampanoag cemetery, it's at the end of Lakeville, but it's actually members of the Squeen family who were Native Americans. Wampanoags Lakeville had a native population well into the 19th and early 20th centuries, native cemeteries were often on hills or near bodies of water, graves were from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards, graves were marked with stones field or sometimes later with carved stones, sometimes you see a couple of stones with petroglyphs, Onam designs, carved designs or really fascinating images, no one has done a complete study of the native cemeteries in this area or markers, but I always remind myself that when I started working at Plymouth Plantation many years ago, my boss was not passionate and said to me: We've been burying our people around here for ten thousand years, the whole place is a cemetery , so they are there.

There is much more to study about these traditions. The famous Coles Hill, just opposite our disappointing but famous Plymouth Rock, Coles Hill was used as a cemetery in that first winter, if you are a member of the story, about half the people of the one hundred and two passengers aboard the Mayflower when they arrived They died that first winter starting in November, they started burying him at sea and then when the Mayflower arrived. In Plymouth Harbor, from December to March, until the houses were built, people were on board the ship and they began to die and were taken there.

There is a large sarcophagus erected in 1920, it has a vault inside with remains that have been washed away by water have been discovered. at Coles Hill over the years, that is a list of all the possible Mayflower people who were probably buried at Burial Hill or buried at sea. Well, the Mayflower was still in Provincetown Harbor. The ones you know are the most famous, of course, Priscilla Alden's parents Priscilla Mullins I was always affected by the story of John Turner, he was a single father who came with two small children, none of the three survived that first winter.

It gives you an idea of ​​what these people were facing, how drastic that decision was. leaving Leiden, a very cosmopolitan city in the Netherlands, and arriving here, on the coast of the new world, to try to build a colony. a funeral cabbage hill was probably used as the first cemetery. There is an oral tradition that James Thatcher wrote about in his 1832 History of Plymouth, people were buried at night, so the natives did not know how drastically their numbers had decreased. Most likely they just buried them at the end of the day and it gets dark pretty early around here in March, January.

From December to January to March the remains of at least eleven individuals have been discovered separated since 1735, when they began to wash and you can see approximately how they traced. 1735 a ravine formed, an intermediate street washed away bones and some of The other remains were discovered when the foundations were being dug and these were not natives because the body was upright, so they were definitely Europeans and these were the people who perished in the first winter There is a photo of some of the remains. They were photographed and they were assembled over the years and photographed before being placed in that large vault under the sarcophagus.

Now, to understand cemeteries, it is important to understand the mechanics of Puritan funerals and Puritan burials. Most people don't realize how different the old Puritan burial is. the customs were what we practice now, they are the people who came here, the immigrants were Puritans, they wanted to purify the church, they didn't want anything like the old Roman Catholic or even the Anglican pomp of the Church of England, for them, everything was added to superstition and separatism. Minister John Can, coined in 1634, regarding burials, all prayers, whether over or for the dead, are not only superstitious and vain, but are also idolatry, and, contrary to the simple Scriptures of God, the non-conformists will cause the dead to be buried in this way, that is, to be carried to the burial place with some honest company of the church, without singing or reading, without any type of ceremony used until now except that the dead are handed over to the grave with such gravity and sobriety that those present seem to fear the judgments of God.

Puritan burials were very restricted affairs, no prayers were offered, no singing, no elegies were made, nothing that gathered in the house went with the body, you know, in a procession, they would bury the person and then come back, that was all in the early days, many of us It seems veryrestrained and also quite difficult. I mean, you want to have hope, you know life after death, but this was the father, religion, and the Puritans. There's a great quote in Yes, one of my favorite books is David Standards, the Puritan Way of Death, which is really. fun reading, reading that in the teenager scares people, the manner of death, quotes a Puritan minister, Robert Bolton, who wrote in 1635 and David Stannard, the sociologist who wrote this book, used the phrase that parents were not afraid to death as children would fear the dark because of their unknown parents they feared death because they knew since they were children exactly what to expect Hell fire and damnation yes and they were Robert Bolton the spiritual minister wrote your body when the soul is gone will be a Hara to all who behold a Most Loathsome in a horrible spectacle, those who love him most now cannot find in their hearts how to look at him because of Leda's pain, for which death will impose upon him.he must fall into a pit of carrion and confusion, covered worms that cannot move even a little finger to eliminate the vermin that feed and gnaw at their flesh and thus become moldy or turn into rot and dust when the soul departs from this life, it takes nothing with it. with that, but grace, the favor of God and a good conscience, they don't beat around the bush, do they do it with the Puritans?

They very much believed that we were sinners and damned forever unless you passed, you know, they took advantage of Christ and they heard this from when they were little. that this was going to be his test throughout his life and the corpse itself, which you know, was just described all that rot and worms and everything that is a shroud for the grave, the V is actually you, a shroud for the grave, the men only have This is a picture from 1604, the details of which show a detail of a corpse in a rolling sheet when the body is known when someone has died, the body is cared for in the house in Plymouth Colony, the Right family members are Cle washed in a rolling sheet, which isn't like a mummy, you know, with all the little bits, it's more like a big piece of wool tied in a knot on the top of the head and on the feet, quite crudely, it's like an act like a big tootsie roll, it basically means the same thing as some flowers.

Sprigs of rosemary are placed inside the cloth and you will see that you can open it to see the face of the person you know to say goodbye. They have a wake that usually lasts about a day. Oming was not done too often. Embalming is the removal of the soft tissues and fluids you know and replacing it with something inert you know as sawdust or actual embalming fluid, but later in the 17th century, people like Thomas Prince might have been involved because, for More than a few days, the processing chemicals would still begin to swell the body, but most burials were done very quickly within two or three days.

Graves were dug and in the Plymouth records several times they had to pass laws that said graves had to be dug at least five feet deep, you know, traditionally. now stands six feet, the coffins were usually simple gable-lid coffins like the ones you see there, most of us would think you know the hexagonal coffin shape, there are some sort of traditional coffins, but more archaeological evidence from the colonies suggests that all up and down along the Tidewater and New England they had gable tops, so they were wide at the top, narrow at the bottom and built like a kind of peak along the edge and so the hands could fit, you know, right in front, like this. and the reason we know about them not only through visual materials like this, but also in the archaeological record, when tombs were found, they found a small line of rust right in the middle, where the nails that held the top of the gable had corroded. away, this is how we know that, although capable, lidded coffins were the ones used now.

Thomas Leopard was a lawyer who came to Boston in the 1630s and wrote a book Plain Dealing or New England News published in 1642 and in fact gave the only description of a 17th century funeral in New England in the burials there is nothing red nor is there any funeral sermon made, but the whole neighborhood or a good company of them gather together by knocking on the tollbooth and carry the dead person solemnly to his grave. Ministers commonly presented very restricted matters, but throughout the decades of the 17th century this began to change. Beginning in the 1670s and 1680s, there was a tradition of returning to the family home of the deceased person, where food was shared as if it were a Today, there is often a lunch after going to someone's home. , which became an occasion for the 1720s, Massachusetts had to pass laws because people spent a lot of money on food and especially on alcohol, rum, and cider.

It is purchased in large quantities after the wakes and funerals of these settlers here is one of those early elegies John Alden Esquire he John Alden died in 1687 buried in Duxbury two side elegies were actually printed the fathers have a fascination with death and These Elegies began to appear in the 1650s as the older original generation began to die out throughout New England. These long rambling allergies were preached and then also printed and here you can see small details of a funeral procession. could have looked and that is from a volley which is actually from four important Thomas Leonard of Taunton 1713, but the image itself actually dates from an earlier volley from 1667, so you can see the type of procession in which they would take the deceased person to the to their burial now here is my favorite burial Hill I have spent a lot of time up there it is one of the most extraordinary cemeteries in New England one of the most important of our early cemeteries recently there have been some archaeological excavations along long At the bottom you can see where the path leads, that's where the brick stairs are today.

You can see the original school on the right. They had the school right next to the cemetery. I like it, right behind some of the vaults. They've been doing some digging just to the right of them last summer and found one of the original houses of the UMass archaeological team, but this has been the location of a cemetery, as far as I know, since 1621, now I think Coal Hill. It was abandoned after the first winter and I think the first burials here were probably for Governor Carver and his wife Carver died sometime in April He went out into the field He came back and complained of being hot and feeling pretty well He fainted three days later His son died wife Catherine died five or six weeks after her husband, in April 1621, the pilgrims had established the city, they had divided the house.

Lots created the street where they had a place where they imagined a meeting house or at least a fort. Most likely they used the top of the hill as a cemetery. Cemeteries noted that the term in New England was always part of the common ground. You would set aside land for a common town or training ground Greene for the meeting house and for a Cemetery: this was done throughout New England, as towns were formed in you before the Reformation, if you died you had to be buried in consecrated ground, right ground that was blessed by a priest and only people who died in sin were buried outside of the suicidal thieves. excommunicated, it was really terrifying to be buried outside of consecrated ground, but for Reformation Protestants that didn't matter anymore, so the cemeteries here in New England were never churchyards, they were never consecrated or holy

grounds

, they were just secular parts of the common. land many of the older cemeteries were originally part of the city common the granary cemetery in boston which was originally part of boston common new haven green the bodies are still under the green they moved all the headstones later except a few that are in the basement of one of the churches, so I think they probably left it aside as early as 1621.

A fort, a watch house, was built there in the 1640s and '40s, and then what I think happened was that this was the original part right at the top, this kind of rectangular section and in that section you find Bradford's, you find Howland's, you find Edward Gray, the oldest dated headstone there, 1681, you find Thomas Clack's headstone from 1697 , you find some of the other older carved tombstones, me too. feeling it and the a is that area B is where the guard house was. My feeling is that that is the beginning of Burial Hill and it is on a hill.

Nearly half of all New England cemeteries are on hills. I think in Boston I think of an old burial. hill in Marblehead, you know these wonderful places that would probably be difficult if you take a dead body that you know for burial, so why would they choose simple hills? Flat land is too valuable to build on or farming a hill is much better. This place just by using it as a cemetery and using it as additional pasture as a cemetery was not treated with much respect, let's say, even the old cemetery in Duxbury in the 19th century that was used as a cow field and there were reports of cows, you know, tearing down gravestones as they walked to the gray to graze, so it is a common land and they share it and there are accounts of various types of rituals surrounding the burial.

Governor Carver is buried with a volley of gunfire. Governor Bradford. when he dies, it's some kind of state funeral and they have a military procession with another volley of gunfire when one of my pirates sails to Plymouth in 1646, one of the crew dies in Boise and they, the trained band, have a funeral procession for the murdered man. and the captain of the ship, Captain Cromwell, hands out black cloth for everyone to wear, so there's a kind of commotion, these funeral decorations that start with the old cemeteries and here's that part that you can see, you know, the randomness The Gravestone Burial Hill is yes, extremely important, but it has also been greatly modified by old Clement Bates, the 19th century sexton, who boasted of burying some 2,400 people there.

He moved many of the headstones in the 19th century. During the 19th century, many of the roads were built here and in Boston Salem, in some other places they made the old cemeteries a little prettier and a little more tourist friendly, let's just say that only the more rural ones have a idea of ​​what it means The original cemetery looked like some kind of extra section that they added to if you go there today, that's the location where the forts were built, the first in 1622, the second in 1675 during King Philip's War, now the strong. it was torn down the next year 76 77 and I think that's when the burials started there, if you go there today, that's where the Cushmans are buried, old Thomas Cushman, that first headstone we saw, also the Warrens are up there.

Something interesting about Warren's Richard Warren came alone to the Mayflower, he died in 1628, his wife and five daughters came a few years later, they had a few more children, Richard died in 1628, his wife Elizabeth did not remarry, she died in 1673 , survived it. husband for decades and most likely my feeling is that she would be buried somewhere near her husband or maybe he was moved to wherever you go, in the old cemeteries, you will see the families somewhat grouped together, you will see how in the Burial Hill. Bradford's and the Morton's are next to each other, Howl's lands are all in one area, go to the old cemetery in Duxbury, all the Alden's are in one corner, it was common to bury some kind of family relationship together, now headstones like me .

As mentioned above there are probably only about 30 carved tombstones from the Plymouth Colony era before 1692, maybe a handful from late '69 and that's because most people couldn't afford them and there are a couple of reasons why these Puritans were iconoclasts. I didn't want anything that looked like the old Roman Catholic style of, you know, crosses and markers, it was too close to superstition for these Puritans, so originally they didn't want any kind of marker. Most likely later in the 1650s they began marking graves not only with paired field stones like these, which are still often found in many of the ancient cemeteries, but also stone markers. wooden coffin rails there are only reports of them, none survive from the 17th century, obviously a piece of wood standing out in a New England countryside will not last many years.

Samuel Sewell, writing in 1698 or 1702, wrote that he went down Barnstable Lothrop Hill and went to see the grave of the Reverend Wally, who had died in the 1670s, so about 20 years earlier he said he saw the railing of the coffin fell everywhere it had already rotted it had rotted but field stones pairs of field stones Winslow Cemetery in Marshfield is incredible you go there and see what there isgraves marked only with field stones and you know they are marking graves because there are random lengths and they are all on an east-west axis and that is how the bodies were buried.

I said the Europeans buried their bodies lying there, always buried on an east-west axis in the west, feet to the east. in the belief that when the Resurrection occurs, when the Messiah returns, he will rule, he will return to Jerusalem and you will want to be sitting and looking in the direction of Jerusalem, you know, just to make sure you don't miss him when he returns, the oldest tombstone. The headstone carved throughout the Plymouth Colony is actually in East Providence Rhode Island, it was the original settlement of Rehoboth and this little headstone WC 1659 for William Carpenter.

There are several like this and you find these really rough carved tombstones all the way down. In the 1730s, throughout the rural areas, carved headstones were expensive and difficult, you had to be an artist, you had to have free time to do it. It wasn't until the 1670s that carved tombstones really began to appear in Boston. Myles Standish The colony's own military leader is buried between two triangular-shaped filled stones and how do we know he was dug up a couple of times in the 1890s? They had lost track, even the local people of Duxbury really had no idea where Standish was buried. he buried him in his when it was his property he buried him in the old cemetery people had all these different theories so they finally dug him up there was an oral tradition that he was buried in the center of the old rolling route between two fields shaped like triangle stones, you can see what it looked like before they dug it up there and found the body of an older man near the bodies of two younger women and the body of a child, a young boy.

This is very much in accordance with Standish a- - the will in which he said that I wish to be buried near the bodies of my daughter Laura and my daughter-in-law Mary, who had just died about a year or two ago and the body of the child is probably his son Charles, who died around the age of 9 or 10 some souvenirs, let's say, were taken from the cemetery pieces of the fabric to roll the sheet to roll and here you can see pieces of wool one has that little band of color there they are wool with indigo dye indigo is simply It became popular in the 1650s, so it is a fine piece of wool in which the captain was kept in which he was buried.

Pieces of his coffin were saved and, along with some more gruesome mementos still floating around, but most of him was reburied in the 1930s. Gravestones when they start appearing in Boston are pretty simple. William Patty as the main boundary of the 16's, 30's and 40's moved to Boston and had the oldest dated stones in the entire city of Boston. It's a rhythm of burying the ground and it's this one. Green stone, short and squat, very thick. You will see this type of stone in many places around Boston, towards Watertown and Cambridge, in Dorchester, and you know, very simply, that here lies Mr.

William's body, his life in August 1658, even the stone of the foot exists and the foot stone said that this stone erected in 1672 a tombstone and a foot stone as a bed and this continues until the beginning of the 19th century when you ordered a large tombstone for someone. usually with the epitaph facing west and then a stone at the foot of the grave, the curious story about William Paddy Stone in 1830, workmen were digging under the foundation of the old State House on State Street, they found this stone underneath, had been taken and used as a foundation stone, many old tombstones have turned up as foundation stones, slabs, there is even an old story about an old bakery in North End, one of the tombstones was used in the oven, so you get loaves of bread with parts of a kind of epitaph. of cooking in it benign neglect of burying semolina is nothing new and this was part of it.

One of the other early headstones in all of Plymouth Colony is for Thomas Willett, who died in 1674. He is an interesting character who really plays an important role in Plymouth. Cologne was 19 when he left Leiden he was about the same age as Rembrandt he was a little boy at the same time Rembrandt was a little boy running around the city of Leiden Willet learns English and Dutch as a child he emigrated here in 16 29 and 30 he becomes merchant, marries the daughter of one of Plymouth's wealthiest settlers, John Brown's father moves up the front row, you know, toward Rehoboth and then to what was technically Swansea at the time and is now East Providence River Side, he becomes one of the richest of the Plymouth settlers when he dies.

In reality, he is also a slave owner. He owns eight black slaves. He is also a slave owner because he speaks Dutch. He is elected the first English mayor of New York City when the English They took over New Netherland in 1666. He is a very interesting man and he has this tombstone here. 1694 Here lies the body of your worthy Thomas Willett. Very interesting character. Now they are starting to carve tombstones and that is my favorite up there. That is Phineas Pratt. He is buried. in Charlestown they are Puritans they are Protestant, so there are no crosses, there are no Easter lambs, there is no Roman Catholic iconography or images, they go back to ancient medieval images of time-limited death of the speed of life, winged skulls, you see spikes and crossed spades, crossed bones, coffins, hourglasses similar to the tradition of van itas in artwork in art history you know these images of cut flowers with the idea yes, the flower is beautiful but it will wither and die very quickly hourglass the speed of time Fugit hora tempus fugit carved on all these tombstones the image of the winged skull is thought to be an image an effigy of the soul after death but awaiting judgment for the Puritans remember that they could never really be sure if they were chosen or not whether they were chosen to go to heaven so they were always a little anxious about what was going to happen to them after the afterlife, so now we get to some of the cemeteries around here now, all of these wooden markers, field stones, some old carved headstones, you start to see them in the landscape itself, this is because we are in the Scituate Man of Kent cemetery. which is a fantastic cemetery quite rectangular in shape, remember that rectangle at the top of Burial Hill, from what I have seen, the oldest sections of most of the Plymouth Colony cemeteries, all the oldest ones have this older shape or less rectangular with a ratio of 1 to 4, usually 20 to 30 yards wide and about a hundred yards long at most and I was wondering about that and then I remembered that this is how most house lots are divided, so it's likely that when you divide up the city sections, you start laying out the areas, the meeting house sections follow these kind of rectangular features, of course, it has some wonderful early stones, Captain John Williams, this beautiful very clean looking headstone here lies buried the body of aged Captain John Williams.

Approximately 73 years old left this life on June 22, 1694. Notice that that nine has that extra bit on the bottom to make it look like a... which appears on a complete group of tombstones carved by a man named William Mumford in Boston Scituate . some of the oldest headstones because it's on the coast, it's easier to transport a carved headstone from Boston by boat, everything is traveled by boat right now, very few people own horses and nowadays, without traffic, it takes us, already You know, a good 40 minutes to get into town, but it would take a whole day to travel from Boston to here to get situated or, you know, a day and a half to get to Plymouth and then meet up, if you've ever helped move a headstone, those are heavy.

The first tombstones appear in coastal towns in places where there is a little wealth and they are being shipped from Boston from Carver's Professional Cemetery Wow, this is one of the oldest inland towns and there are no carved stones from Boston Totten was an important city, a rich city, it's on the water so it could have been easy to go all the way, you'll take the River Totten and go around the Cape, but that was too expensive, so you find really rough stones like this to Damaris Smith 1689 you find filled stones roughly hewn to the 1720s this is one of the oldest cemeteries in one of the most important cities in the colony and even the tombstones of Leonard The family, the richest family in the city, owners from the blacksmith shops, it is still roughly carved even in the 1720s and 1730s, so when you look at these old cemeteries, there are often large gaps in the middle, ensuring that there were field stones or wooden markers or other shapes of tombstones. other forms of burials take place in those sections and many times in the old cemeteries that you see there in Scituate, behind a small dark purple one that looks like it, with the bites taken out of it, there is a large rock, which Most likely when you see some large flat stones in an old cemetery they are placed there as a marker they are actually a type of what is called wolf stone there was an exaggerated fear of wolves digging up fresh corpses from the beginning hence laws for burying five feet deep at Dorchester North Cemetery in Boston, there are some very old wolf stones, large, flat stones and they were meant to keep wolves away.

People had an exaggerated fear of wolves in this area. Lothrop made Barry Graham sick in the bond barn. Members of the Scituate residents followed Reverend Lothrop. until establishing links with some emigrants from Massbay and Lothrop Hill was the second cemetery. We know this because in Reverend Lothrop's diary he mentions that the burials took place in the Cavs' pasture. He thinks this is the area where you meet the people of the city. all the cows were kept together, the calves were in a section, you know, separate from the main herd, so it was probably the safest and easiest place for burials, which now no one is really sure about, but Lothrop Hill starts to be used in a few years. of the founding of Barnstable and Lothrop Hill has this type of small undulating mounds again, it is not the flat land that is too valuable for agriculture, the broken type of land is used, that type of sandwich is the same as several others have exactly the same type of topography as the old town.

The sandwich cemetery is a neat little hill that you actually have to climb to get to the first part, so it's kind of a small version of Burial Hill in Plymouth and it's right next to Lake Xiaomi there in Scituate, there's no sandwich. Sorry, one of the other things with most of these like the old Yarmouth cemetery, this is one of the few that's actually on flat ground, because there's nothing else in Yarmouth, it's all flat, but a lot of These were the original sites of the Plymouth meeting houses, of course the location of the meeting house was moved down the hill to Town Square, but located Duxbury Marsh Fields Barnstable Yarmouth half a dozen of the other towns where the meeting house was erected, The first meeting house generally the cemetery was near Taunton. kind of a unique exception where the meeting houses up here and the cemeteries way down on a strip of land, but they bury Duxbury the same, but for most towns the location of the meeting houses then changes to Marshfield, in Particularly, the old Winslow Cemetery, you know.

This nice elevated spot overlooking the entire main road passed us by, but then the low-key moved to what we now consider Marshfield Center. Same with Yarmouth. Same with many other cities. What happens is a lot. Some of the oldest cemeteries are permanently abandoned after the 17th century or reused only from the 19th century or expanded over the years. It can be seen that Yarmouth simply kept the cemetery and simply added to it. Settling here is somewhat similar, Kent's men are at Meetinghouse Lane and then slowly moved up the street a bit. This is a recurring theme and pattern throughout Plymouth Colony Cemetery.

West Bridgewater, the old cemetery. This is the original. Kind of a Bridgewater location, which is all Bridgewater's Plus Brockton in the 1650s, but you find some very old stones, including the two monuments there, the two table vaults, the one to Samuel and Susannah Edson, which is on the left pictured in color and below, the grave of the Rev. James and Susannah Keith Vaults are extremely rare in Plymouth Colony cemeteries. What is a vault instead of an individual grave with headstones. Chef, a table sometimes has stairs and several family members could have been buried on them. in the 19th century they became much more popular when granite was quarried in Quincy and the above ground vaults were covered with some of the dirt that is seen in almost all of the old 19th century Barry cemeteries around here.

Cemetery.Think about it, think about the terms fun cemetery or burial place, it's what they always referred to in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term cemetery was not used until the early 19th century. Cemetery is derived from the Greek meaning city of sleepers. the change in attitude towards death after the Revolution you go from the old winged skulls and then you get faces of cherubs, portraits of angels from the 1790s, you have stuck placing urns and willows and the language you get is no longer here lies buried of the body of or here lies buried, you know, which is very immediate, you get the memory of this person, the old tombstones are designed to remind the viewer of your own mortality, think of the old epitaph when you pass, so I was once me and stuff, that's what puritans do. were doing with these old cemeteries, they were meant to remind the living that you too will die.

Gravestones from the 19th century, you have to think about the memory of the person, that's a fundamental change in religion that happens after the Revolution, but back to the old ones here here's a little curious the masks on Hill in Middleboro Middleborough of course It is an inland settlement nothing more than farms along several of the streams and rivers there are native people living in Middleboro in Titikaka there are only a handful of old headstones and it has started as early as 1660 but the first ones do not appear until the 18th century . We see that a lot with several of the early ones and it's driven a lot of people crazy, especially genealogists, you know, when they go looking for headstones of people, particularly from the colonial era. probably only 10 to 20 percent of the settlers here in the seventeenth and seventeenth centuries have headstones in some form or another, most people do not.

What's also interesting is that about half of all New England colonial headstones are for people under the age of one. 21 technically children infant mortality infant mortality from diseases or accidents was much higher than today in the 18th century. 17th century, if you lived to be 21, you had as much chance as anyone today of making it to a hundred, but it was that high mortality, particularly of children, but it's kind of reassuring that they're still thinking enough, you know about the loss of these children to erect headstones for them, you know, we might think well, you know, the Aldens had ten children, you know, some of them are mine. family, I'm the last of five, they used to jokingly call me the spare right, you know, you'd think maybe they wouldn't be here as much, but of course they did it at the Cove Cemetery in Easton, now on the Cape, which is a coastal city.

It's easy to get some Boston tombstones, but very few Eastons actually voted to leave Plymouth in 1645 and move to Easton. Plymouth just wasn't working for anyone when they moved, but only a few started moving to Easton, the interesting thing is there are three Mayflower passengers there Constance, how can Safra Jers smear? Another Hopkins, but Thomas, isn't it? Thomas with Thomas Prince, the governor who came with the fortune in 1621 when he died in 1673. he lived in Easton, he dies at the end of March, but he is not buried for ten days and when he is buried, in the records it is mentioned that he is buried in Plymouth.

Now March and early April are still cold enough to preserve his body, but somewhat. had to be done, so it is probably the most likely evidence that someone was embalmed from the beginning, but he chose to be an object or someone chose to have him buried in Plymouth, presumably on a burial hill where there is now no marker, a of things about the old cemeteries can be incredibly frustrating trying to find some of them. Dartmouth, for example, is a particular problem because Dartmouth, the original Dartmouth, was the towns of Westport, Dartmouth, New Bedford, a cushion on Fair Haven, a large swath of the south coast, but it was not founded like Plymouth nor was it located with a center to begin with or even after 18th century cities, it was founded as a group of small neighborhoods, small agricultural neighborhoods and they were all spread out, also Dartmouth were Quakers, the Quakers even more so than the Puritans.

If you want some kind of burial marker, one of the only really good examples of this is that if you go to the Pembroke Quaker meetinghouse, there's a little cemetery behind it, there's our 19th century stones, and they still don't even notice them. I like to use them. The month names just liked to use the day number, the month number and the year, that's all, very, very simple little stones, so that the Quakers are not marking the burials at all and, as close as I can calculate, it is a cushion. The cemetery that is at the head of the waterbed in the village churchyard, which is adjacent and part of Queen Anne's churchyard, was probably where the first burials occurred and that is the evidence, you know, the second and third generation of them it's probably them.

They are buried with their parents, but there is also this interesting tradition. The monument on the right is for John Cook. The Mayflower passenger dies in 1695. The last male survivor of the Mayflower voyage dates back to the 1880s. Someone's rights were that he was buried on his own property. Oxford points down. in Fair Haven and you can drive through today. I took that photo probably about twenty years ago, but this took hold and in the 1890s they erected that monument. This is an ancient oral tradition of burying people on their own property, which is usually done.

The exception to the rule, most Puritans had a sense of community at that time. They had family in the little Commonwealth, but they were part of a community. Cotton Mather, when he wrote about Dartmouth, said you know because they were all Quakers and Quakers. he had no ordained ministers, so there was no established minister at Dartmouth. Cotton Mather said that they were perishing without vision at Dartmouth, meaning they didn't have the educated leadership and the religious leadership, so it can be a little frustrating, especially in cases like John Cook's. monument there in Fairhaven, this is the old Littlenecks Cemetery, which is an incredible example of how these old Plymouth Colony cemeteries are transformed.

It's this little old 17th and early 18th century cemetery on this neat little stretch of water and then there's this huge 19th century cemetery and 20th century cemetery around it, but it's on this peninsula and you literally have to driving through a 1950s housing estate, a bunch of little capes and slab ranches to get to it, it's the strangest combination and shows the kind of reuse of these old cemeteries. and this is Mary Brett Willett, this is the list for Thomas Willett, that first headstone that I showed you, so this is the first pair of male and female headstones that I can find for a Plymouth couple and they are way over there in the east .

In Providence there were earlier records of earlier tombstones in Marshfield there were tombstones dating back to the 1650s but they disappeared sometime in the 19th century William Thomas died in 1656 was recorded as having a tombstone, but it disappeared over a century ago and a La Halfway through now King Philip's War changes some things in Plymouth Colony. Of course, there are attacks on cities. Half of the cities are attacked and burned. see the grave of Nathaniel Woodcock, he was his son, he was in the family of the man who owned the Woodcock garrison house that was in North Attleboro and he was out and a native party attacked and killed the youngest boy, Nathaniel , there's a like when he was in his early 20s, he was buried under that marker and it's, you know, half a block from where the garrison house was, so this place is marked buried where he was killed and then, more late, in the 18th century, you know. 50 years later, they start burying other people there and it becomes a small local cemetery.

On the right is the tombstone of Edward Bobbitt who died June 16 '76 and in Berkeley, the story is that he was at the garrison house in Taunton, but he returned with his dog to his house to retrieve a wheel of cheese . I guess it was very important. Unfortunately, a native group came to buy it. He tried to hide in a tree, but his dog kept barking, so the natives found him, killed him, and buried him. on his on the property and that tombstone was erected over it, you can see the actual rough carving and you could see the whole part underneath where it was on the ground.

It was broken in the 18th year of the 1950s when a carriage passed over it. 1911 was collected and put into the collections of the old Pony History Museum in Taunton, so these are two types of small isolated cemeteries times, one actually becomes a cemetery, the other there is a monument that a four where Bob is alone, buried there, and one of the interesting things after King Philip's War, the Plymouth settlers finally got what they wanted at Mount Hope. Bristol has a beautiful natural harbour. Bristol Rhode Island, much more beautiful than you imagine. Plymouth Harbour, which is very shallow. dead to windward if you're trying to get out of there Bristol had been Mount Hope had been the place where the masses were, so he and his sons Alexander and Philip why am I soda and Metacomet after the natives are defeated Fights in the Plymouth colony and comes to Bristol and is organized and is a planned city established in 1680 by the proprietors, they actually create the city in a grid pattern, a very early example of urban planning in New England, you can see where the square is green, that's the common town, but part of the common corner was used for burials, but at the end of the 18th century they decided it wasn't good to have all those tombstones there and started moving them across the street, towards what is now It is called the East Cemetery instead of what was previously In the West Cemetery, of course, they left the bodies, so the bodies are still under the common, but many of the old headstones have now been moved to the other side of the street, including the oldest, the tombstone that Captain Nathan Haman 1689 noticed in these cemeteries, these old ones.

All the cemeteries have this kind of unique identity, it places the men of Kent, the headstones are very different from Marshfield, the old Winslow cemetery, especially in the 18th century, when you look at the stones, they are very different again from Duxbury, they reflect who lived in town at that time reflected different ideas and I have to show you this one because it's actually right across the street from my house where I live in Norwell, it's the site of the first Scituate autoparish meeting house in the 1640s, they fought. Here in Scituate and a whole group of parishioners headed down the street a little bit and ended up being the second parish that they settled on Wilson Hill in 1642 and 45 built a meeting house and erected a cemetery.

The last tombstones were removed. in the early 1800's two of them were later found because this is obviously the Lee farm and this is a photo taken in the 1920's by Charles Gleason of Hanover the last two stones for Thomas King 91 Cornelius Brittany four were literally discovered because there are many stones often hidden underground in places. I don't know what happened to those stones or where they ended up, maybe someone will find them one day because we can put them back on my lawn if you want, but what happens is that the cemetery remains when in 1680, because more people are moving along the North River the church moved to the small churchyard just off 120 Union Street.

There is a small churchyard on the hill and then in the 1720s the church moved again to what is now Norwell Senta . and you see the big, beautiful Norwell Center Cemetery, so cemeteries have sometimes been abandoned. There is no trace of the cemetery outside this large rock monument. I'm really really hoping that maybe some of them are buried in my front yard. because I love living near a graveyard and a graveyard. I didn't know it when we made the offer on the house three years ago, but I was very happy when it happened, but this shows you that there are probably a handful of other cemeteries.

In many of the towns, some of the last of the 17th century Plymouth Colony, you know, places like Rochester, Freetown or Swansea, isolated cemeteries usually occur when there is a small community or something like those individual cemeteries during the War of King Philip, the rule is more people were buried in what was the type of municipal city cemetery in the secular area. I love this photograph. I took this situation. Cannon men. If you go there today, it is a beautiful cemetery. It has that rectangular shape like many of the. in others you can see a variety of tombstones, you can trace a couple of different ideas about mourning and customs.

You can see that there are three unique types of headstones in Scituate. They're not actually slate, they're shale, which is a type of stone that was common along Newburyport's long Newbury River from the Merrimack River to Newburyport in that area.and the builders of the Merrimack River wash community that the North River was building, so there are these wonderful little stones with these almost Celtic faces, you know? very primitive faces with these wonderful bird designs beautiful stones but very different from the skull with the wings very different from some of the North River Carver or vinyl stones that you will also see on the dark board one of the interesting things about this these tombstones many times those that appear around here from the 18th century onwards the carver barely knew how to read and write a poor carver must have been dyslexic because all of his ends are upside down each of his tombstones the ends are upside down he was probably just Copy what someone had written to him to be able to continue for much longer, but I've continued for about an hour, so one of the best things, particularly this time of year, is that yes, it's wonderful, everyone is creepy, particularly creepy. late afternoon but these cemeteries are 17th century landscapes and we are incredibly lucky to have them still preserved in this area and there are always so many different stories that you can find in all these old cemeteries so I highly recommend everyone to go.

You know I hate every time I lead a tour of this cemetery. I always hear people say, "Oh, I've always wanted to stop by and see what's there, especially at this time of year when it's so beautiful, thank you all so much." a lot