On Saturday, September 18th Heritage’s Director of Collections & Exhibitions and resident gravestone expert Jennifer Madden led a tour of three historic burying grounds on the Cape. Starting at Cobb’s Hill in Barnstable and making our way through Lothrop Hill (also in Barnstable) and finally Yarmouth Ancient Cemetery, we examined carving motifs and how their changes from the mid-17th century to the 19th century reflect shifting societal ideas about life, death and what comes after.
Graveyards are like outdoor museums. A walk through one will take you back in time and face to face with the people of the past. Stones tell us of lives cut short by tragedy or exceedingly long lives spent entirely within a stone’s throw of their final resting spot. Epitaphs can be touching or funny (either intentionally or not), proving that a good laugh never goes out of fashion.
At Yarmouth Ancient Cemetery we saw a fantastic and funny stone, brought to the group’s attention by tour participants Thomas Bihl and Shana Drake. The stone, pictured here, reads, “Here Lyes Buried the Body of Mr. Anthony Paddock, Who was Dround in the Vineyard Sound on That Very Cold Day February the 15th 1731 in the 22nd Year of His Age.”
Bihl and Drake, who discovered this amusing stone on a stroll years ago, have tried to find out more about That Very Cold Day by checking the date, February 15, 1731, against accounts of historic New England storms, but without any luck. If the day was cold enough to live on in popular memory, perhaps the most likely place to look is in diaries or personal accounts from the period. In the present , we can only speculate on the specific circumstances of the unfortunate Mr. Paddock’s passing and wonder just how cold was it?
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