Elizabeth Pain - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
The final paragraph in the novel certainly paints a picture of a stone in the King's Chapel cemetery:
"And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial–ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb–stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever–glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:— 'ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.'"
Another prominent headstone is that of Joseph Tapping. Per the wayside marker at the cemetery:
Joseph Tapping - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - Joseph Tapping - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - Joseph Tapping - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - Joseph Tapping - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
"Time and Death" - Frances Quarles' Hieroglyphiques of the Life of Man |
Harriette M. Forbes researched New England gravestones and their creators, and wrote the book Gravestones of Early New England and the Men who Made Them, 1653-1800 (1927). She concluded that "the gravestones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried a message to the passerby both by the epitaphs and even more by the designs," and that the meanings could be categorized - with the death's head marking "The certainty of death and warnings to the living." As time passed, the death's morphed into the "soul effigy," and eventually into other iconography such as the urn and willow that are commonplace on Victorian-era markers.
Even more interesting is that the evolution of this iconography can be quantified in time and place as outlined in the groundbreaking studies of James Deetz and Edwin Dethlefsen, resulting in their fascinating and highly-readable scholarly paper, "Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries," published in American Antiquity in 1966 (full text here).
You can see that evolution throughout both the King's Chapel and Granary Burying Grounds and in some of the photographs I've shared in the past few posts - here are a few:
Detail - King's Chapel Burying Ground - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - Granary Burying Ground - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - King's Chapel Burying Ground - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - King's Chapel Burying Ground - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Detail - King's Chapel Burying Ground - Photo by Jim Schmidt |
Another very good book I read was Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers by M. Ruth Little (1998).
For a great study of Colonial-era cemeteries without this type of imagery (and why that is), I highly recommend Elizabeth A. Crowell's "Philadelphia Gravestones 1760-1820," in Northeast Historical Archaeology (Vol. 10, Issue 1, 1981), the full text of which is available here.
You may also like these other posts on this blog:
Other Posts About Boston:
Boston #1 - Poe Statue
Boston #2 - Robert Gould Shaw/54th Massachusetts Monument
Boston #3 - The Boston Massacre and the Old State House
Boston #4 - King's Chapel Burying Ground
Boston #5 - Granary Burying Ground
Other Posts About Historic Cemeteries:
Granary Burying Ground - Boston
King's Chapel Burying Ground - Boston
St. Louis Cemetery #1 - New Orleans, LA - My YouTube Video here
Jewell Cemetery State Historic Site - Columbia, MO
Sunset Hills Cemetery - Boonville, MO - here and here
Galveston (TX) Cemeteries - here and here
Jefferson City (MO) National Cemetery
Springfield (MO) National Cemetery - (blog posts here, here, here)
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