Pettibone Cemetery offers more questions than answers
Editor's note: This is the first in a summer-long series in which Advocate writer Judith Fairweather visits old cemeteries to try to dig up interesting tidbits of local history. Read all of her columns at blogtheberkshires.com.
By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER
LANESBOROUGH -- Now that I have successfully navigated my first year in a classroom after a nine-year absence, it's time to pack away my teacher hat along with my lesson plans and dig out my Advocate reporter hat and notebook.
Of course, the first thing on my agenda was the resurrection of my "Grave Matters" column. How lovely it was to be skulking around a graveyard again, trying to decipher vanishing inscriptions from ancient marble headstones while trying to make connections or draw conclusions about the people buried there.
My first stop this summer was at the Pettibone Cemetery on Old Cheshire Road, right on the Lanesborough/Cheshire line. I chose that one because my dad has driven by it for years and wanted to know about it. Interestingly, it's also one of the two routes I take to get to Drury, yet I never even noticed it until I went searching for it last week.
It is a small cemetery, with maybe 30 or so stones, tops. As always, the stones that drew me were those of the children. The Porter family experienced great tragedy in a short period of time. Sumner Porter, son of Philip and Martha Porter, died Oct. 18, 1832, at 18 months old. In 1832 there was a massive cholera outbreak that started in North America in Montreal in June and quickly worked its way down to New York. Was Sumner a cholera victim, perhaps?
Just a short six years later, the Porters would experience a double tragedy. Their son Charles, 4, would die on April 23, 1838, while another son, Sylvester, 5, would die four days later. Again, was this the result of an outbreak of illness? In addition to cholera, "consumption," or tuberculosis, as well as smallpox were responsible for many childhood deaths in the early part of the 19th century.
To try and discover if there had been some recorded outbreak of illness in 1838, I read through the April 1838 editions of the Pittsfield Sun. I came up empty-handed. There were two items that caught my eye, however. The first was a national news piece from the April 26 edition: The wife and two children of Aneel D. Glass, living near Lyne, Mich., were found murdered in their home. The article said, "The marks of blood and slaughter indicate that it was perpetuated by the Indians." It was theorized that Glass had been carried off and murdered.
This piece struck me because several months later, in the winter of 1838, President Andrew Jackson would order the relocation of the Cherokee of Georgia, a journey known as the Trail of Tears. This tiny article clearly showed how U.S. attitudes could allow such a crime. Shameful.
I also saw an advertisement by Lorenzo Kellogg, who was looking for "5 or 6 female weavers" for the Green River Manufactory near Great Barrington, "to whom liberal wages will be paid." The first power looms, a vital step in the American Industrial Revolution, had been installed in Uxbridge in 1820. Clearly, manufacturing had migrated to the Berkshires by the 1830s.
But I digress. Back to the Porters: There was a baby, Cordelia, who would survive whatever had taken her brothers in 1838, but her victory was short-lived. Cordelia would die at age 4 on April 11, 1841.
The family then experienced a period of relative calm, until the close of the Civil War. On June 18, 1865, 18-year-old Nelson passed. Try as I might, I could not find any record that Nelson had served in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, so it is certainly possible that Nelson could have died of battle wounds a few months later, but I could not determine if this was so.
In stark contrast to the Porters, the Pettibones buried there were extremely long-lived, although the first Pettibone headstone I came to presented a challenge. It was the marker for Daniel Pettibone, who died Dec. 26, 1848, at 51 years old. There was an epitaph -- my favorite! -- but much of it was illegible. Putting my 11-year-old, Caroline, to work, I had her dig through the car to find a crayon so we could do a rubbing of it. While she puzzled over the letters, I continued my research. We ultimately came up with the following, although I cannot guarantee that we were correct in our interpretation: "The dying moment is at hand/thy grace oh Lord is above/that I may boast at thy command/the victory o'er the grave."
Daniel would be one of the youngest members I found. Others included Lucy, wife of Philo, who died in 1835 at age 65; Jonathan, who was 92 when he died in 1821; Mary, Jonathan's wife, who was 73 when she died in 1813; and Amos, who died in 1850 at more than 89 years old. What a difference!
So my first stop this summer unearthed young deaths and ancient deaths and also prompted me to get sidetracked by my visit to the Berkshire Athenaeum's Local History department. No surprise there. My next stop is planned for a cemetery in Hinsdale, with the tour provided by The Advocate's own Kelly Bevan. Dust off your history books and come on along!