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Chesterfield NH

Epitaphs Tell More Tales in New England’s Graveyards

The epitaphs in New England’s graveyards tell many tales. Carved into the chiseled stone are stories of people who lived long rich lives and babies who breathed only hours; lives tragically cut short by accident or misfortune and lives that grew weary.

Old Town Burying Ground, Sandwich, Mass.

Such a one was Roswell Stowell who died Dec. 2, 1875, age 60, in Chesterfield, N.H. His epitaph reads,

Let no one stand behind my grave,
Now that I am called to rest,
Nor shed a tear that I am gone,
For what I need is rest.

Rest from the weary load of care,
Rest from the wearing pain:
For Death shall ever be to me
An everlasting gain.

I know the road was bright and fair
Or once it seemed to be.
But it has changed so much of late,
It has few charms for me.

Soon Rotten

Mary Fowler probably wouldn’t have appreciated her epitaph upon her death at age 24 in Milford, Conn.

Molly tho’ pleasant in her day
Was suddenly seized and went away
How soon she’s ripe, how soon she’s rotten
Laid in her grave and soon forgotten.

Capt. E. Griffin, 1767, Madison, Conn., lies under this verse on his tombstone:

The Boreas’ blasts and Boistrous waves
Have tost me too and fro
In spite of both, by God’s decree
I harbor here below.

While I do now At Anchor ride
With many of our Fleet
Yet once again I must set Sail
My Admiral Christ to meet.

Another ship captain, Augustus N. Littlefield, who died at 75 in 1878 in Newport, R.I., had something else to boast about. His tombstone reads,

An experienced and careful master
Mariner who never made a call upon
Underwriters for any loss.

Ephraim Wales Bull, who developed the Concord grape, received no rewards for his effort — something his epitaph reflects:

Ephraim Wales Bull
The originator of the Concord Grape
Born in Boston March 4, 1806
Died in Concord September 26, 1895
He sowed, others reaped.

One epitaph in a Boston burying ground recounts the patriotic career of a Son of Liberty:

Here lies buried in a
Stone Grave 10 feet deep
Capt Daniel Malcom Mercht
Who departed this Life
October 23d 1769
Aged 44 Years.

A true son of Liberty
A Friend to the Publick
An Enemy to oppression
And one of the foremost
In opposing the Revenue Acts
On America

Editorializing

This epitaph is an artifact of the baby boom that populated the colonies:

Litchfield, Conn.
Here lies the body of Mrs. Mary wife
Of Dea. John Buel Esq. She died
Nov. 4 1768 AEtat. 90
Having had 13 children
101 grand-children
274 great-grand-children
49 great-great-grand-children
410 Total. 336 survived her.

And in Duxbury, Mass, a gravestone reads:

Asenath
Widow of
Simeon Soule
Died
Feb. 25, 1865
Aged
87 years, 11 mo.
19 days.

The Chisel can’t help her any.

Score-settling epitaphs were not uncommon. In Boston, one gravestone reads:

Here lies ye body of
Mrs. Ammey Hunt wife of
Mr. Benjamin Hunt
Who died Nov. 26, 1769
Aged 40 years.

A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,
Whom I did love most Dear,
And now her Soul hath took its Flight
And bid her Spightful Foes good Night.

Childrens’ Epitaphs

The many, many infants who died young sometimes inspired whimsical commentary:

Ezra Thayer Jackson died after 25 days in Plymouth, Mass., in 1783.
What did the Little hasty sojourner
Find so forbidding & disgustful in
Our upper World to occasion its
Precipitant exit.

In Manchester, Vt., a stone marked the grave of three children who died in 1821, 1823 and 1824:

Here in the dust 3 babes we
Sleep by our Father here
our Mother Brothers
Sisters dear have left us
alone to moulder here.

This epitaph was reported in Lincoln, Maine:

Sacred to the Memory of Mr
Jared Bates who Died Aug. the 6^th
His Widow aged 24 who mourns
as one who can be comforted lives
at 7 Elm street this village
and possesses every qualification for a good wife.

Before the American Revolution, epitaphs modeled after the medieval Edward the Black Prince’s were common. They said, essentially, “I may be dead, but you will be too.”

One such example is the tombstone of Daniel Noyes, who died in Newbury, Mass., on March 15, 1716 at the age of 42:

As you were, so was I
God did call and I did dy
Now Children all whos name is Noyes
Make Jesus Christ
Your only choyes.

Read more old New England epitaphs here.

With thanks to Over Their Dead Bodies, Yankee Epitaphs & History, by Thomas C. Mann & Janet Greene. This story was updated in 2023.

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Abner Kneeland, The Free-Speech Martyr Convicted of Blasphemy in 1838

Abner Kneeland was a powerful and energetic Universalist minister whose religious doubts and political beliefs sent him to a Massachusetts prison in 1838.

Abner Kneeland

Depending on who you asked, Abner Kneeland was either “a venerable, learned and strictly moral man,” or “hoary-headed apostle of Satan.”

He was also a free thinker and a pantheist, which is what got him into trouble, at least technically. But he was prosecuted as much for telling working people and immigrants to question authority.

His conviction was widely denounced and no one was ever prosecuted for blasphemy in Massachusetts again.

Young Abner Kneeland

Abner Kneeland was born on April 7, 1774 in Gardner, Mass., the sixth of 10 children born to Timothy and Moriah Stone Kneeland. He studied for a year at an academy in Chesterfield, N.H., but then his formal education stopped. Abner and his older brother then moved to Dummerston, Vt., to follow his father’s trade of carpentry. He also taught school and wrote a spelling book. By the age of 27 he joined the Baptist church in nearby Putney, Vt., and began to preach. Within three years he converted to Universalism.

In 1804 he was ordained as an itinerant minister in New Hampshire, and settled down with his wife in Langdon. In 1811 he moved to a promising church in Charlestown, Mass. However, he abruptly resigned the ministry three years later, overcome by religious doubts.

Doubts

Kneeland and his wife then went into the dry goods business in Salem, Mass. His good friend Hosea Ballou, a prominent Universalist theologian, brought him back to the ministry in 1816. He then took up a pulpit in Whitestone, N.Y. But again his doubts asserted themselves.

He moved to a parish in Philadelphia in 1818. Kneeland energetically led the church, publishing sermons and tracts, editing newspapers, compiling a hymnal, translating the New Testament and developing a new system of spelling. He fell under the influence of utopian socialist Robert Owen and began to adopt then-radical ideas about social reform. Before his free thinking got him into trouble in Philadelphia, he moved to a church in New York City.

Federal Street Theater

He began to attract attention, not of the good kind, while preaching in New York. He and his followers broke off from his church, forming the Second Universalist Society, but soon he offended them, too. Kneeland allowed a radical feminist and abolitionist, Frances Wright, to speak from his pulpit when no one else in New York would give her a platform. Universalists from as far away as Maine passed resolutions denouncing him. He questioned the existence of one God and the divinity of Jesus Christ. By 1830, the Universalists kicked him out of the church.

Infidel Orgies

The next year he moved to Boston, where he found a ready audience. As a lecturer for the First Society of Free Enquirers he spoke to 2,000 people on Sunday mornings at the Federal Street Theater and to as many on Wednesdays. Critics called them ‘infidel orgies.’

Two thousand people, mostly poor immigrants, subscribed to his publication, The Investigator. In it, Abner Kneeland criticized the conservative influence of religion on society and supported equal rights for women and all races. He thought women should keep their own names and bank accounts, and he spoke out for birth control, divorce and interracial marriage.

As a member of the Society he believed it wrong to teach children creeds, miracles and religious doctrine. He preached that critical investigation of religious truths was the basis of good citizenship.

Kneeland’s popularity unsettled Boston’s elite. They worried he would influence the laboring classes to disrespect authority and question their humble place in society.

Blasphemy

Abner Kneeland landed in court after declaring his beliefs in 1833. “I am not an Atheist, but a Pantheist; that is, instead of believing there is no God, I believe that in the abstract, all is God,” he said. “[T]he whole duty of man consists in living as long as he can, and in promoting as much happiness as he can while he lives.”

In December 1833 he printed a letter explaining his differences with Universalism. “Universalists believe in a god which I do not; but believe that their god, with all his moral attributes, (aside from nature itself,) is nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination.”

For that, he faced prosecution five times for blasphemy. His first three trials ended in hung juries.

Abner Kneeland used three arguments to defend himself: first, that he never denied the existence of God, he just denied the existence of a god. Second, the law violated the Massachusetts’ Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion. And third, the law violated the guarantee of freedom of the press.

The arguments didn’t impress the Supreme Judicial Court, though it took two years for Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw to issue his decision. Shaw’s decision was criticized as one of the worst of the 2,200 he handed down during his career. In it, he argued Kneeland had blasphemed God with malicious intent. He defended Massachusetts’ blasphemy laws, and he concluded freedom of the press did not gibve a ‘general license for scandal, calumny and falsehood.’ Unlimited freedom of the press would prevent authorities from punishing ‘all incitation to treason, assassination, and all other crimes however atrocious.’

Backlash

Lemuel Shaw decided against Abner Kneeland.

Ralph Waldo Emerson signed a letter defending Kneeland. So did William Lloyd Garrison, Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker. More people, however, signed letters supporting the court.

Kneeland served all of 60 days in prison – and became a martyr for the cause of free speech.

The London Investigator criticized the prosecution in 1857. It called Kneeland “a venerable, learned and strictly moral man sentenced and carried to jail for publishing his honest belief on matters of religion.”

“Massachusetts, which is so much extolled as being superior to all other States, is probably the only State in the Union where the Christian bigotry that used to burn heretics at the stake is still suffered to disgrace the statute-book,” remarked the Investigator. The Windsor, Vt., Statesman opined, “that if Kneeland could not speak his mind the very cause for which the Pilgrims came was overthrown. ”

After his release, Abner Kneeland moved to Iowa, where he started a utopian community called Salubria. He died August 27, 1844, and the community failed soon afterward.

With thanks to the Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography. This story about Abner Kneeland was updated in 2023.

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Ida May Fuller Gets the First Social Security Check

Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., received the first Social Security check on Jan. 31, 1940.

Ida May Fuller

The check was numbered 00-00-0001, the first of the first batch of 220,000 checks issued to adults as well as children.

Born on a farm outside of Ludlow, Ida May Fuller attended the Black River Academy in Rutland, Vt., three years behind Calvin Coolidge. She worked for a while as a schoolteacher, then in 1905 began work as a legal secretary. She never married.

Between 1937 and her retirement in 1939, she paid a total of $24.75 in Social Security payroll taxes.

While running an errand on Nov. 4, 1939 she dropped by the Rutland Social Security office to inquire. Urged to apply for benefits, she filed her claim.

“It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I’d been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it,” she said.

That first Social Security check was for $22.54, nearly what she had paid into the system.

Frances Perkins

Some critics thought it suspicious that a Vermonter received the first check because John Winant, former New Hampshire governor, was the first head of the Social Security Board.

But it was another New Englander who made sure Ida May Fuller got her check: Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of Labor.

Perkins was born in Boston, grew up in Worcester and summered at her family homestead in Newcastle, Maine. Her ancestors included Revolutionary War orator James Otis.

Perkins persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to ride the wave of Townsend clubs to support a federal retirement program for workers. California physician Francis Townsend started the clubs after he saw three elderly women rooting through a garbage can for food. During the Great Depression, more than half of older Americans were poor.

Thousands of Townsend clubs pressured Congress to pass an old age pension plan. Sensing the opportunity, Roosevelt acquiesced to Perkins’ demand. He assigned her to run the committee that would craft the legislation.

President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins behind him.

“The Taxing Power, My Dear”

As soon as the Social Security Act passed, conservatives in Congress began to attack it as unconstitutional. Frances Perkins had made sure it would withstand judicial scrutiny. Months before Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935, she had consulted with Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, a native of Chesterfield, N.H.

Kirstin Downey describes what happened in her biography of Perkins:

At an afternoon part at Stone’s home, Frances was drinking tea with the justice when he asked her how things were going. She told him they were wrestling with how to establish an economic security program. Stone looked around to see if anyone was listening, then leaned in toward Frances. “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power,” he said in quiet tones.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act.

Paying for My Expenses

Though Ida May Fuller had paid into Social Security for only three years, she received monthly checks until her death on Jan. 27, 1975 at 100 years old. She received a total of $22,888.92 from Social Security.

During her last eight years, Ida May Fuller lived with her niece in Brattleboro, Vt. Near the end of her life she told a reporter her Social Security benefits “come pretty near paying for my expenses.”

She was described in 1955 as “a kindly, likable, practical and placid woman whose ability to derive deep satisfaction from simple, wholesome living has eased her through life.”

But as a Republican, she hadn’t voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

Ida May Fuller was 76 when the photo at the top of the page was taken in 1950. Congress had just voted an 80 percent raise in benefits, and she held up her check for $41.30. She didn’t think Congress should have raised the benefits.

With thanks to The Woman Behind the New Deal, by Kirstin Downey. This story was updated in 2021.

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