Grave Matters

Editor's note: This is the fourth 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 -- While serving as assistant editor of The Advocate, I traveled two routes to get to the North Adams office from my Pittsfield home, one of which took me up Route 7 to Summer Street, from where I hopped onto Old Cheshire Road and then to Route 8.
This route took me right past an old cemetery in Lanesborough. Every time I went by, I wondered about the old stones I saw and about the stories of the people buried there. Thus, the Center Cemetery, as it is now called, was really the impetus for the birth of this Grave Matters column.
I figured it was finally time to investigate the source of my obsession, so I trekked to the local history department of the Berkshire Athenaeum with my trusty Berkshire Family History Association "A Guide to Berkshire County Cemeteries" in hand. I had the good fortune to encounter Rick Leab behind the desk there. When I explained I needed information on Center Cemetery, he replied that he had several family members buried there. A cacophony of joyous bells broke out in my head: Here was someone I could ask firsthand about the cemetery's residents.

Leab is the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson (yup, six "greats") of Capt. Jabez Hall of Lanesborough. Besides being a soldier, Hall, he said, built three taverns: one on Scott Road, another near the road that leads to Mount Greylock and a third in Dalton.
My investigation into Hall led to a wealth of information. Hall first served in the military in Connecticut, from whence he hailed, during the French and Indian War, even serving as a lieutenant at Fort William Henry in Lake George, N.Y., in the year of its construction in 1755. The fort has been memorialized in James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" as the site of a horrific Native American massacre of British and militia troops upon their surrender to the French in 1757.
In about 1769, Hall moved his family from New Fairfield, Conn., to Lanesborough, where he became a prominent citizen, even serving on the town's Committee of Correspondence, according to Leab. The committees were local bodies organized by the governments of the 13 Colonies before the American Revolution and were responsible for disseminating important information. Many members of the Committees of Correspondence would also become members of the secret Sons of Liberty groups.
Hall, referred to as a "Colonial officer of the Crown under King George" by Charles J. Palmer in his "History of the Town of Lanesborough," published in 1905, is said, according to Palmer, to have received "a sudden call in the night for enlistment of a company of Lanesboro men to go to Canada and fight."
What is referenced here is the first American offensive of the American Revolution in September 1775. The American forces planned to take first Montreal and then Quebec from the British, but all would not go as planned. In Palmer's history, he relates Hall's call to arms: "Early the next morning the able-bodied men of Lanesboro assembled in front of the old Hall Tavern where Capt. J. came out with a black bottle of rum in each hand. Š Leaping into the air he struck his heels together three times before coming to the top step, also clashing the two bottles together above his head.
"Then he shouted, 'Who goes with me to Canada?' A full company was immediately enlisted, and of its members were his two sons Gershom and John, while Lyman, being about 19 years of age, accompanied his father as valet."
Hall and his sons would join the assault under Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery. Montreal fell rather easily on Nov. 28. A second force led by Col. Benedict Arnold was to meet up with Montgomery's force for the much more difficult assault on Quebec. The assault began after midnight on Dec. 31, 1775, in a snowstorm. The first volley killed Montgomery and two of his chief underlings. Things went downhill from there. The assault failed.
But it was not yet time for the troops to come home. Arnold attempted to rally them to lay siege to the city, but was foiled by the desertion of his troops as their enlistments expired, a common issue early in the war, and an outbreak of smallpox that swept through the camp. In the midst of this chaos were Hall and his three sons. Although we can't be sure when, at some point during the winter of 1776, Hall was struck by smallpox. He would never return home to be buried by his wife, Hannah.
Lyman, also a smallpox victim, survived to return home to his mother, as did his two brothers. Lyman would go on to receive a commission as lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, returning to Lanesborough after the war to manage his father's tavern. Lyman died April 25, 1844, at the age of 87, at the home of his son, Gen. Jabez Hall.
In an odd twist of fate, Lyman's mother, Hannah, died on June 8, 1807, just a few days after the May 25 death of Lyman's daughter Hannah. I don't know what caused the deaths, but once again can only presume that perhaps some illness swept through the area and took them both. Smallpox, consumption and cholera are the likely suspects. The younger Hannah's grave bears a somewhat gruesome epitaph: "Young friends behold me/where I lie/and learn from hence/you are born to die."
I leave you now with those words ringing in your ears. There is much, much more to unearth in Center Cemetery. If you dig up something good, be sure to let me know. And give my best to the Halls.

E-mail Advocate writer Judith Fairweather at jfairweather
@advocateweekly.com.

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Editor's note: This is the third 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
CHARLEMONT -- Last fall, I received an e-mail from Bea DaSilva inquiring whether my invitations to accompany me on my cemetery quests were literal or not. She had no idea she was someone from my long-ago past, having served as an English teacher at both my junior high (Crosby) and my high school (Taconic).
Thus, I had the chance to reminisce with her about some former teachers on a recent drive over the Mohawk Trail to Charlemont. How lovely. Our mission was to find a graveyard recommended by Advocate Editor Rebecca Dravis, although that was all I knew about it.
But we weren't going to have to investigate this cemetery on our own. We met Joanne MacLean, director of the Charlemont Historical Society Museum, who, even though an eighth-generation resident, had never visited this particular site. We headed to the Zoar Outdoor property right on Route 2, scrambling up a small hill to reach the gravesite of Capt. Rice, his family and Phineas Arms. Rice and Arms were killed in an attack by Native Americans on June 11, 1755, on the site.

In order to understand the story, we need to travel back in time to the settlement of North America by the French and English in the 17th century. Each culture had its own reasons for colonization. The French were after resources and wealth, such as could be found in the fur trade; the English wanted land.
This race for conquest would inevitably lead to conflict. Caught in the middle were the Native Americans. In the East, squeezed between the French who settled Canada and the English in the Northeast, was the Abenaki tribe, a subdivision of the Algonquian nation of northeastern North America. Continued settlement by the English would prompt the French to seek alliances with the Indians, including one with the Abenaki.
As tensions rose between the French and the English, a series of conflicts broke out between them beginning in 1689. The last of these is called the French and Indian War (1754-1763).
The infamous Deerfield Massacre occurred on Feb. 29, 1704, during one of these conflicts known as Queen Anne's War (1702-1713). During the attack of French and Native American forces, the settlement was razed, 56 men, women and children Colonists were killed, and 109 others were taken captive.
The English could be savage, too. During Drummer's War (1721-1725), in which the French allied with the Abenaki, asking them to raid English settlements, the Massachusetts Bay Colony set a bounty of about $20,000 today for each Native American scalp obtained. Grey Lock, an Abenaki chief, led these raids.
Capt. Moses Rice came to Charlemont in the fall of 1742. Rice, born in 1694, had grown up with these conflicts. In Charlemont, he began establishing himself as a farmer. He soon built his own grist mill, which in 1745 was grinding corn for Fort Massachusetts in North Adams.
In 1746, Rice, for unknown reasons, sent his family away to Old Deerfield. In that same week, Fort Massachusetts was overtaken by French and Native American forces. When Rice finally returned to his home, he found it burnt to the ground, his cattle and hogs killed and his grain destroyed.
Rather than rebuilding, Rice took his family east to Rutland, Mass., where they stayed for three years. He was a determined man, however. The year after another French and Indian conflict ended (King George's War, 1744-1748), Rice returned to Charlemont with his family.
There they lived for another six years, until June 11, 1755. Rice was out hoeing corn with one of his grown sons, Artemas; his 9-year-old grandson, Asa; Titus King; and Phineas Arms. In a fabulous book titled "Charlemont, Massachusetts 1765-1965, a Bicentennial History" written by Allan Healy in 1965, it states that a party of six "St. Francis Indians," as the Abenaki were called, ambushed them. Arms, 24, was killed immediately. Rice was badly wounded in the thigh, while King was overpowered and seized. Asa, thrown from his horse, attempted to hide, but also was captured. It was left to Artemas to run down the road 6 miles to sound the alarm.
The women in the adjoining field, hearing the shots, fled up the hill to the fortified Rice house, where, Healy writes, "they watched as the captives were taken to the high plain behind the fort (Rice's house). Here Rice was left scalped and bleeding." He died later that night.
But the Rices and other families that had begun to settle Charlemont were made of sturdy stock. Despite the tragedy, they stayed. And once the final French and Indian War concluded in 1763, settlers poured into the western portion of Massachusetts.
But this story cannot be complete without including the story of the Abenaki. Before they had contact with Europeans in the 1500s, they may have numbered as many as 40,000. Through devastating armed conflict and diseases such as smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and even measles, there would be only about 1,000 Abenaki at the end of the American Revolution.
They were thus literally fighting for their very lives when the small war party ambushed Rice and his friends and family. And what of Chief Grey Lock, who led raids in the years prior to this event? On the Abenaki website (abenakination.org/historicalsites.html), it credits the naming of the Berkshires' own Mount Greylock to the fact that the English never defeated him, and the mountain was named for him in acknowledgment of his skill and bravery.
And so, if you decide to venture to Charlemont to climb the hill behind Zoar Outdoor, I would ask you to stop along the way at the Hail to the Sunrise monument right on Route 2. A bronze statue of a Mohawk stands with his arms outstretched to the east, honoring the five Indian nations of the Mohawk Trail. A fountain contains 100 inscribed stones from various tribes and councils from across North America. Spend a moment considering all that they lost in their fight to protect their homes, their women and children, their language and culture and even their scalps. There are always two sides to a story.

E-mail comments to Advocate writer Judith Fairweather at jfairweather@advocateweekly.com.

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