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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Brahmin Celebrity Priest Who Wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem was written by a parish priest considered to be the greatest preacher of his day. His name was Phillips Brooks, and a visit to the Church of the Nativity in 1865 inspired him to write the beloved Christmas hymn.

Though best known for O Little Town of Bethlehem, another of his creations enjoys worldwide fame—Trinity Church in Boston.

Trinity Church in Boston

Brooks especially loved Christmas. “The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung,” he wrote.

And he believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, which is why a five-hour Christmas Eve Mass in the Church of the Nativity inspired him to write O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Phillips Brooks, Author of O Little Town of Bethlehem

He was born Dec. 13, 1835 in Boston to a prosperous Brahmin family. His ancestors included the Rev. John Cotton on his father’s side and Samuel Phillips, the founder of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., on his mother’s. His great-uncle, Peter Chardon Brooks, had more wealth than anyone else in Boston. Brooks also had a famous son-in-law: Charles Francis Adams.

Phillips Brooks at 22

His parents sent him to Boston Latin School to prepare for Harvard. He graduated from college with class members who would achieve distinction. Alexander Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, his second cousin Henry Adams and H.H Richardson, who would later design Trinity Church.

Brooks then got a job as a school teacher at Boston Latin, but failed miserably. He got fired. So he decided to enter what became the family business: the Episcopal clergy.

The Episcopal Church

He went south, to the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., in 1856. Three of his brothers followed him into the Episcopalian priesthood—Arthur, Frederic and John Cotton.

New England had not embraced the Episcopal religion anywhere near as much as the South (or even New York) had. But after the War of 1812 it started gaining in popularity. Eventually it became the preferred religion of upper-class Boston ladies, according to Cleveland Amory. “This much I know,” Amory once said. “God is an Episcopalian. From Boston.”

“Although Episcopalians constitute less than 2 percent of the country’s population,” reported the New York Times in 1981, “their social and economic impact is rivaled by few other groups, if any.”

A Giant

Phillips Brooks was ordained as a priest in 1860, just in time for the Civil War. “He was very tall and well proportioned, with a full, round face beaming with health and good nature, a broad forehead, and an erect carriage of the body, with the head thrown slightly backward,” wrote the Times in his obituary. “He had the appearance of a giant, and wherever he went the people were sure to stop in the street and look after him. At 6 feet, 4 inches, he urged his parishioners to pray big. “Pray the largest prayers,” he liked to say. “You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger.”

Phillips Brooks

In 1862 he began seven years of service as rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. He preached against slavery, delivered a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln and exhorted his parishioners to do charitable works.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

After the end of the Civil War, Brooks took a vacation he’d long dreamed about. He traveled across the Atlantic to Europe and then made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

He believed that Christianity was supernatural or it was nothing, wrote his biographer, Giles J. Harp. “For Brooks, the final, non-negotiable bedrock doctrine was the Incarnation. God the Father sending his eternal Son, the Logos, to be born a man in first-century Palestine was the heart and soul of the Christian message; without the Incarnation, there really was no gospel to preach.”

View of Bethlehem, Christmas Day 1898

Brooks described his trip to Bethlehem in a letter home:

“After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem,” he wrote. “It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine…

“Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds…As we passed, the shepherds were still “keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold”.”

Facade of the Church of the Nativity, 1940

Then on Christmas Eve, he assisted at a service in the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. The ancient basilica dated to 326 A.D.; the service lasted from 10 PM to 3 AM, wrote hymnologist Albert Bailey.

Songwriter

Brooks returned to Philadelphia in September. It wasn’t until three years later that he wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem, no doubt remembering what he had seen and felt in the Holy Land.

He asked his organist, Lewis Redner, put the words to music. Brooks told Redner that he had written a simple little carol for the Sunday school service at Christmas and wanted him to write a tune for it.

“Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, ‘Redner, have you ground out that music yet to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”? I replied, ‘No,’ but that he should have it by Sunday.”

By Saturday night he hadn’t come up with the tune. “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony.”

Neither he nor Brooks had any idea of the popularity the song would achieve.

Boston

O Little Town of Bethlehem turned out to be a popular hit and Brooks’ farewell gift to his Philadelphia parish. Trinity Church in Boston named him pastor in 1869 at the relatively young age of 33. He became such a popular idol in that city his photograph was sold in stores. He worked hard, answered every one of his many letters and gave money to just about any poor person who asked, according to his obituary.

The rectory of Trinity Church, where Phillips Brooks died

Known the world over, he grew into one of the most popular preachers in America. He built the Trinity Church building, considered an architectural masterpiece, in Copley Square.

In 1891, he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts. He only held that position for a short time, as in 1891 he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 57. Brooks never married.

Statue of Phillips Brooks in Boston

You can hear O Little Town of Bethlehem here.

In the United Kingdom, people sing O Little Town of Bethlehem to a different tune—Forest Green. You can hear it here

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The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

Images: 233 Clarendon St. By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434478.

With thanks to Giles J Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism. This story updated in 2022.

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Clover Adams Takes Pictures of Grief (Her Own)

The famous statue “Grief” memorializes Clover Adams, a talented photographer whose husband wouldn’t let her work be published.

She committed suicide in 1885 by drinking the chemicals she used to develop photographs.

Her husband, historian Henry Adams, commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the draped figure to portray nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

So why did Clover Adams commit suicide? Do her photographs suggest the reason why?

Clover Adams, Photographer

New techniques gave women a chance to explore photography after the Civil War, and Clover Adams went all in. Her photographs convey isolation and limitation. Many of her settings evoke the claustrophobia she may have felt as a woman in Gilded Age America. Others express isolation and the distance between people.

Brooks Adams, Henry’s brother. Photo by Clover Adams.

She lost her mother at an early age, and married a man descended from the famously remote John Quincy Adams. Though they longed for children, they never had any.

“Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable,” wrote her biographer, Natalie Dykstra.

Clover Adams, Brahmin

Clover Adams was born Marian Hooper on Sept. 13, 1843 into a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, won acclaim for her Transcendentalist poetry. Her father, Robert William Hooper, achieved prominence as a Boston physician. The wealthy Hooper family lived at 114 Beacon St. in Boston’s fashionable Back Bay.

The Hoopers had a history of mental illness.

Self-portrait by Clover Adams.

“I am a ‘Hooper, and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong,’ Clover Adams wrote to her sister.

Grief marred her pampered childhood. her mother died when she was five, and her Aunt Susan, a surrogate mother, killed herself when she was nine. She grow close to her father—too close for her future husband’s liking.

Marriage

In 1872 at her father’s summer home at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts, she married Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of diplomat and historian Charles Francis Adams. Henry Adams described himself as ‘absurdly in love’ with her, but his brother Charles warned him about the family’s mental instability. “Heavens!–no!–they’re all crazy as coots,” he said when his brother told him he intended to marry Clover.

Henry Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Henry, a workaholic writer and historian, told her how he’d ‘improve’ her once they married. He discouraged her artistic pursuits. In one of his novels, he wrote that a woman ‘cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs.’

When Clover Adams got interested in photography on a trip to New York, he told her that wouldn’t happen again. And when a prestigious magazine wanted to use one of her photographs on the cover, he said no.

Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. Photo by Clover Adams.

Washington, D.C.

Five years into their marriage in 1877, Henry and Clover Adams moved to Washington, D.C. She belonged to the literary circle called the Five of Hearts, along with her husband, John Hay, Hay’s wife Clara and Clarence King, the famous geologist who led a double life pretending to be a West Indian railroad porter with a secret family in New York City.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,, friend of the Adamses. Photo by Clover Adams.

Her world was a clubby little one: her friend John Hay had an affair with her brother-in-law Brooks Adams’ sister-in-law, Nannie Cabot Lodge.

Her friends viewed her as witty, clever, athletic. Perhaps they sensed her troubled nature. She inspired Henry James to write Daisy Miller in 1878 and Portrait of a Lady in 1881. When she died, James wrote, ‘poor Mrs. Adams found, the other day, the solution of the knottiness of existence.’

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

Grief

She remained close to her father, to her husband’s dismay. When he died in April 1885, she lapsed into a depression.

In 1885, the Adamses were building a baronial mansion on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and living in temporary housing on H Street.

On Dec. 6, 1885, Clover Adams drank half a vial of potassium cyanide in the bedroom of their rented home. Henry then found her lying on the floor in front of the fire in the fireplace.

Henry Adams with the family dog. Photo by Clover Adams.

He never mentioned her, not once, in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and he destroyed all her letters and photographs of her. A year after he died her wrote a friend that he hadn’t had the good luck to attend his own funeral. But, he wrote, “I have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.”

With thanks to Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra. Featured image of the Adams Memorial By Wikipedia Loves Art participant “red_herring” – Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7821686. This story was updated in 2022.

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Henning Jacobson Loses His Fight With the Board of Public Health Over Vaccination

Henning Jacobson, a Swedish minister, in 1905 refused vaccination during a smallpox epidemic in Cambridge, Mass., in 1905. Then he refused to pay the $5 fine and took his case to court.

Henning Jacobson in 1878

The conflict between individual rights and the common good went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the end, Henning Jacobson and his personal right lost. The court sided with the state, ruling that it could use its police power to protect the public health.

The case has since been called one of the most important pieces of public health jurisprudence in the United States. Judges have cited it in many cases since, including one in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Henning Jacobson

Henning Jacobson was born in Sweden on Sept. 15, 1856. When he turned six, Sweden ordered compulsory vaccination and he submitted to it. It caused him “great and extreme suffering.”

As a boy, he immigrated with his family to America in 1869. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen and studied for the ministry at a Swedish Lutheran college, Augustana, in Rock Island, Ill.

Jacobson married Hattie C. Anderson in 1882. They had five children, but only three sons — Fritz, David and Jacob – survived to adulthood.

Ordained in Kansas, the Church of Sweden Mission Board in 1892 called him to build a church in Cambridge, Mass., where a growing community of Swedish immigrants lived. Jacobson started the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Church of Cambridge, and would serve as its pastor until his death in 1930.

Today it’s the Faith Lutheran Church.

Faith Lutheran Church.

Jacobson did more than conduct services in Swedish. He met arriving immigrants at the docks and brought them to Cambridge, where he found them work and places to live. He visited them in tenements, in boarding houses and in factories.

The church started out with 23 members and met in rented halls. From 1894-1909, it met in Prospect Hall at 40 Prospect St., now the home of ImprovBoston.

Smallpox

In 1901, a virulent strain of smallpox broke out in the Boston area. Boston alone had 1,596 smallpox victims and 270 died from it. In late 1901, Boston’s Board of Health ordered that everyone in the city be vaccinated.

A smallpox victim in 1912.

Massachusetts in 1855 had become the first state to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. An element of xenophobia informed that attitude. People blamed Italian immigrants for bringing polio with them to the East Coast. On the West Coast, people blamed the Chinese for bubonic plague. In the 1901 smallpox outbreak, 49 percent of the victims whose birthplace was identified were immigrants. But only 35 percent of Boston’s population had foreign origins.

Anti-vaxxers called compulsory vaccination ‘the greatest crime of the age.’ It would ‘slaughter tens of thousands of innocent children.’ The vaccination issue had more importance than slavery because it debilitated the ‘whole human race,’ they argued.

Newspapers sided with the state, calling anti-vaxxers ‘ignorant barbarians’ and ‘hopeless cranks.’ The debate amounted to a ‘conflict between intelligence and ignorance, civilization and barbarism,’ reported the press.

Jacobson v. Massachusetts

On March 15, 1902, the chairman of the Cambridge Board of Health knocked on the door of the Cambridgeport triple-decker where the Jacobson family lived. The visitor, Dr. E. Edwin Spencer, told Henning Jacobson the board had voted to declare a smallpox outbreak. All Cambridge residents had to be vaccinated if they hadn’t in the past five years. Refusal brought a $5 fine.

Pastor Jacobson refused. He argued he and his son had had bad reactions to earlier vaccinations, and he wouldn’t risk it again.

Three months later, the epidemic reached Jacobson’s Cambridgeport neighborhood, almost to his door. Ambulances brought dozens of his sick and dying neighbors to the nearby hospital.

The city ordered the library, schools and churches all closed. “Nothing less than a panic has been produced by the terrible epidemic of smallpox which has broken out in the city this week,” reported the Cambridge Chronicle on June 21.

Vaccinators, accompanied by police, canvassed the Cambridgeport neighborhood, vaccinating everyone they could get their hands on. Sometimes they vaccinated more than 100 people a day.

On July 17, 1902, Edwin Spencer swore out a criminal complaint against Henning Jacobson. Six days later the pastor found himself before a judge, along with a handful of other Cambridge anti-vaxxers.

The Court Case

It took three years for the case to reach its conclusion with a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Justice John Marshall Harlan

Jacobson argued that mandatory vaccination law was ‘hostile to the inherent right of every freeman to care for his own body and health in such a way as to him seems best.’ He also claimed the Massachusetts law violated the state and federal constitutions because it made no exception for his own medical history.

He lost all the way to the Supreme Court.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the opinion against him. The safety of the public may at times demand the suspension of personal liberty, he argued. With memories of the Civil War still fresh, he wrote that a community has the right to protect itself from disease the way it had the same right in a military invasion.

Jacobson could probably have taken some comfort in the court’s decision to allow medical exemptions for those who might have a health issue with vaccinations. However, the court ruled Jacobson didn’t qualify for such an exemption because he seemed a healthy adult.

In the end, Jacobson paid the fine.

Impact of Jacobson v. Massachusetts

Since then, the courts have upheld compulsory vaccination many times, wrote Lawrence O. Gostin. “Even the rare judicial reservations about compulsory vaccination focus on religious exemptions and do not query states’ authority to create a generally applicable immunization requirement,” he wrote.

The U. S. Supreme Court cited Jacobson v. Massachusetts in the 1927 case Buck v Bell. In it, the high court upheld a forced-sterilization law, arguing the common good required protection from the responsibility of caring for the children of ‘imbeciles.’

“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in an infamous opinion.

In 2020, a federal court of appeals used Jacobson v. Massachusetts to justify a ban on abortions in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic. The state included abortion in a regulation prohibiting nonessential surgeries.

With thanks to The Human Body on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, by Lynne Curry and “Jacobson v Massachusetts at 100 Years: Police Power and Civil Liberties in Tension” by Lawrence O. Gostin in the American Journal of Public Health, April 2005. And to “Pox An American History” by Michael Willrich. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Places Connected to Illicit Love Affairs

Illicit love affairs are as much a part of history as are war and elections, and the New England Historical Society doesn’t hesitate to publish stories about them. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you six places connected to illicit love affairs. They include a movie star’s home, a racy monument, several historic houses and a watch tower. There is one for each New England state.

Hepburn House

Katharine Hepburn’s house

Katharine Hepburn had a 25-year love affair with her married co-star Spencer Tracy. It only ended with his death.

At their introduction on the set of Woman of the Year, Katharine famously said, “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy.” Film director George Stevens retorted, “Don’t worry, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”

Instead, he fell in love with her and she with him. “I loved Spencer Tracy. I would have done anything for him,” she said.

They starred in nine movies together, but lived apart and kept their affair private. Tracy and his wife were estranged, but neither sought a divorce.

Tracy and Hepburn did stay together at Hepburn’s summer home in the Fenwick beach colony in Old Saybrook, Conn. Her caddy remembers them having breakfast together.

When Tracy died in 1967, Hepburn didn’t attend his funeral service out of respect for his two children. She did follow his hearse on the six-mile trip through Los Angeles and, when it reached the church, whispered, “Goodbye, friend – this is where I leave you.”

The house, on Mohegan Ave., is privately owned, but you can visit the Katharine Hepburn Museum in Old Saybrook. It’s at 300 Main St. Click here for more information.

Cliff Walk Path and Many (Supposed) Illicit Love Affairs

Cliff Walk Path, York Harbor, Maine

What’s worse than not getting any Valentine’s Day cards or letters? How about getting a letter announcing that your wife has a heartthrob — just not you.

Allen Ryan received just such a jolt in 1922 about his wife Sarah and her “friend,” entertainment lawyer George Maxwell. Ryan, a one-time king of Wall Street, had so much money and clout he could move the stock market at will.

The shock of the poison pen letter received by Allen Ryan jolted society all the way from Philadelphia to Maine, where the Ryans summered at York Harbor. York Harbor in the Roaring 20s was a popular destination for wealthy summer travelers escaping the cities.

The ensuing scandal resulted in Maxwell being charged with sending the poison pen letter himself, along with letters to husbands of 40 other society women with whom he was supposedly having illicit love affairs. George proclaimed his innocence and blamed his enemies. Predictably, the affair ended in the Ryans’ divorce.

York Harbor has changed a lot since the Ryan-Maxwell scandal of the 1920s, but you can still get a flavor of the old days on the Cliff Path along York Harbor, where gracious cottages of long-ago York remain perched on the edge of the sea.

Emily Dickinson Museum

Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin carried on an illicit love affair for 13 years with Mabel Loomis Todd, also married. The whole town of Amherst, Mass., including Todd’s husband, knew about the affair. He was okay with it. Austin’s wife was not.

On Sept. 10, 1882, Austin took Mabel to sing and play the piano for his two reclusive sisters and mother, who lived next door to him. Emily listened to her from the shadows of the hall, but never appeared. Only Emily’s sister Lavinia ,,met Mabel face-to-face.

The next night, Austin and Mabel paused on their way to a whist party and confessed their love for each other. “Rubicon,” Austin wrote in his diary afterward.

Their liaison was one of the better-chronicled of the illicit love affairs. Austin and Mabel kept diaries, in which they called their love ‘overwhelming,’ ‘God-inspired,’ ‘beyond any love that ever was.’

Mabel described their sex life in her diary: “Sweet communions. Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable” and “A little Heaven just after dinner.”

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to publish her poems. They did, and Mabel embarked on a lecture tour that made famous the reclusive Emily.

Mabel’s affair with Austin ended with his death in 1895.

The Emily Dickinson Museum includes both Emily’s and Austin’s house at 280 Main St. in Amherst, Mass. Click here for more information.

John Parker Hale House Museum

The Woodman Institute Museum, Dover, N.H. , which includes the Hale House

In the 1860s, Valentine’s Day was the perfect opportunity for a young man to flirt with a girl from a different class. People then viewed a Valentine’s note as an acceptable way to express their affection without fear of giving offense.

In 1862, one of the South’s most notorious villains took the opportunity to express his affection for one of New Hampshire’s leading ladies. To his surprise, perhaps, John Wilkes Booth captured the eye of Lucy Lambert Hale.

Hale charmed a great many men in both Washington and New England. John Hay, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Todd Lincoln were all said to have expressed some interest. Her father was John Parker Hale, a U.S. senator, abolitionist leader and Lincoln supporter. But an anonymous Valentine in 1862 from Booth caught Lucy Hale’s fancy, and soon the two got better acquainted.

Hale was mad enough that his daughter was involved with an actor. Imagine his shock when his daughter’s beau turned out to be an assassin.

When Booth was captured after killing President Lincoln, he had Lucy Hale’s picture in his pocket. Senator Hale spread word far and wide that Lucy was not engaged to the actor-turned-murderer. Father and daughter then departed for an extended visit to Europe.

One of Lucy Hale’s gifts to New Hampshire is the house where she grew up. The Woodman Museum at 182 Central Ave. in Dover, N.H., acquired the Hale house in 1915, and it’s open to visitors.

Hannah Robinson Tower

The view from the Hannah Robinson Tower

Hannah Robinson fell for a poor French dancing teacher and set off one of the greatest scandals of colonial America. Her love affair was less illicit than unapproved and tragic.

Born in 1746, she was the daughter of a wealthy Narragansett planter. The family lived in a large stone house in Newport near Narragansett Bay. During the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau visited the Robinson house.

Hannah wanted for nothing, and one of her favorite pastimes was to sit on a large rock and look out at Narragansett Bay. She was sent to finishing school in Newport, where she fell in love with her French dancing teacher, Peter Simons. Peter returned Hannah’s feelings, but the lovers knew her father wouldn’t consent to a marriage. He believed Peter wanted Hannah’s money.

They eloped one night and set up house in Providence.

Unfortunately for Hannah Robinson, her father was right – and he cut her off financially.

Peter abandoned Hannah after he realized he wouldn’t get any of her money. When her father learned his daughter was poor, ill and suffering in Providence, he finally relented and went to fetch her.

On their slow journey home, she asked them to stop when they reached the large rock where she had watched the bay. Unfortunate Hannah Robinson died soon afterward at home on Oct. 30, 1773.

In 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a new watch tower at the site where Hannah Robinson watched the Bay. The Hannah Robinson Tower, is now owned by Preserve Rhode Island and managed by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

You can find it at the interchange between U.S. Route 1 (Tower Hill Road) and Route 138 (Bridgetown Road) in South Kingstown, R.I.

An Illicit Love Affair Revealed in Hope Cemetery

Louis Brusa gravestone

Most of the people buried in Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vt., carved their own memorials and tombstones. Barre calls itself the granite capital of the world, and skilled stonecutters flocked to it from Europe, especially Italy, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The 65-acre cemetery attracts tourists with its beautifully carved and sometimes unusual granite memorials. They include images of a soldier smoking a cigarette, a race car, a bored angel, a soccer ball and an 18-wheel truck.

Louis Brusa was an Italian-born master stonecutter. He practiced his craft in Barre with the new compressed air tools, which made his work go faster but sent granite dust into his lungs.

Louis, born Luigi Giovanni in 1886, became a partner with the Brusa Brothers. He developed silicosis from the granite dust and died at the age of 51.

As he was dying, Brusa decided to warn others about the disease. He then commissioned Don Colletti to carve a memorial of a man dying in the arms of a woman. When the monument was placed over his grave, it caused a local scandal. The woman looked not like Brusa’s wife Mary, but just like his mistress.

This story about illicit love affairs was updated in 2022.

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