Tag Archives: Quakers

by

Another Dead Stranger Identified

No comments yet

Categories: Death, Graves, Solebury, Tags: ,

Our Stranger Found Dead (10-28-1880) has been identified. Cold and alone he took refuge in the warmth of a lime kiln, but the gas from the cooking lime asphyxiated him in his sleep. He left in search of work and wound up dead, another unknown body buried in Strangers Row.

From the Doylestown Democrat from November 2, 1880:

An unknown man was found dead at John Conner’s lime kiln, in Solebury, on Thursday morning [this] week. He had visited the house of Jacob Parson the evening before, and said he was on the way to Lambertville, where he had the promise of work. This was the last that was seen of him until the next morning, when he was found dead near the kiln. A jury was summoned, and after due deliberation returned a verdict of death by suffocation. The body was placed in the hands of Wm. Large, overseer of the poor, and was buried in Solebury Friends burying grounds on the following Saturday.

This was apparently a common hazard. I found another article about an unknown tramp found dead near a lime kiln around this date, and I know that Albert Large (the so-called Hermit of Wolf Rocks) was found and saved after he passed out next to a kiln.

And what about Albert’s relative William Large, overseer of the poor? He died in 1888 and is buried at Solebury Friends Meeting. His title certainly lends credence to the idea that people were buried in Strangers Row out of charity.

At some point I need to track down some old property maps to figure out where our two strangers died. I’m not sure where Parson and Conner lived, but because the man was travelling to Lambertville I’d bet they lived along Lower York Road. Our previous dead stranger was found in Huffnagle’s woods, and I believe the hamlet near the old Heath mill where Sugan Road meets Stoney Hill was known as Huffnagle.

by

Strangers Row Takes Shape

No comments yet

Categories: Digitized Data, Graves, Methodology, Solebury, Tags: ,

After hours of slogging through data to construct a database of graves for Solebury Friends Meeting, I’m finally able to sort the data to reveal some interesting patterns. The map below shows Strangers Row, listed as Section B of the graveyard. As you can see from the aerial photo, it’s nearly empty. The rows follow the same trajectory as the lines of headstones below it in Section C.

Note: The row numbers begin at the lane and count up going east. The plot numbers begin against the wall and count up going south. The grave location is recorded as Section-Row-Plot, so the grave listed as B-01-02 is Section B, Row 1, Plot 2.

The green arrow marks the grave of our Stranger Found Dead, 1880. As you can see, headstones finally appear consistently in Section B, Row 6.

This is what I’ve learned so far by analyzing the information in my database:

  • The plots were first come, first serve. When I sorted the graves by row and plot number (B-01-01, B-01-02, etc.), they were almost perfectly chronological. This is a significant difference from other sections, where families purchased plots and were buried sequentially in a line. (ex. in Section A members of the Blackfan family are buried in A-08-01 through A-08-08, even though their death dates range from 1825 to 1905.) The one regular exception to this rule is that when a spouse died, a plot was sometimes reserved next to them. This exception is responsible for most of the out-of-sequence graves. This pattern begins to break down in Row 10 around the 1930’s.
  • Graves are undated until the late 1860’s. Assuming the undated graves were also dug in chronological order, all but three graves before 1866 are undated. Only four graves after 1866 are undated. This roughly corresponds to the oldest section of the graveyard, Section A, where only a handful of dates are listed in the 1860’s and earlier.
  • Headstones appear consistently in the 1880’s. There are virtually no headstones in Section B until Row 6, which begins in the 1880’s.
  • Strangers Row is full of children. In the undated section, children account for 52% of all graves. In the dated section, they drop to 31%. Many or most of them are buried without their parents. (ex. There are 4 Alcotts, 7 Birches (from 5 different fathers), and 8 Fishers, all children without parents.)
  • There are some families, but their graves are not contiguous. For example, Eli Doan is buried in B-01-11, his wife is in B-02-42, and his children are in B-02-01 and B-02-02.  There are 10 Kitchens, but only two are buried next to one another. This is the opposite of the rest of the graveyard, where adjacent plot numbers correspond to surname instead of date. There are no family plots in Section B.

An important question remains: Where does Strangers Row end? I pose this question both geographically and temporally. Is there an actual row of demarcating the end of Strangers Row? Is there a date at which Meeting decided to treat Section B like any other part of the graveyard? It’s possible that even after it was no longer Strangers Row in the older sense, Meeting found it convenient to use Section B to bury the “odds and ends,” people who did not own family plots.

I’ve got some more dredging to do. First of all, I’d like to compare family names in Section B to other parts of the graveyard and try to find the parents of some of the buried children. I’d also like to investigate the Moons, Doans, and Ely’s buried in Section B. As far as I know these families were Quaker, so I was surprised to find them buried here.

That’s all for now, but I’ve got a lot more work to do if I want to identify the social and economic factors that landed these poor souls in Strangers Row.

by

A Stranger Found Dead

No comments yet

Categories: Graves, Solebury, Tags: ,

Strangers Row, an open patch of lawn

When I read Rayna’s post about an unknown grave at Solebury Friends Meeting, the text of its headstone obscured by tree roots, I immediately knew the grave she was talking about. I grew up in that graveyard.

We were the caretakers, and when my mother worked my brother and I went with her. We spent hours upon hours in the cemetery, finding ways to keep ourselves occupied. One of our favorite games was to jump from headstone to headstone, moving up and down the rows while our mother mowed. I’ve read every name on every headstone, connecting the roads and hills of Solebury to the old family plots (Ely, Paxon, Armitage, Kitchen, Pidcock, Magill). As a teenager I even dug some graves myself. I know the place pretty well.

But this enigmatic tree-eaten grave gave me pause. Weren’t there other unknown graves? A fragment of a memory came back to me. Something about a man found dead in a tree. A stranger whose body was discovered and buried in the graveyard. I thought I’d read it somewhere, so I looked through some books (MacReynolds’ Place Names in Bucks County, Davis’ History of Bucks County) but found nothing.

So I asked my father, who was the caretaker for about ten years starting in the mid-70s until my parents divorced. Did he remember anything about unknown bodies buried in the graveyard?

He came up with the same story about a stranger found dead in a tree (We can rule out the power of suggestion. I hadn’t mentioned it). The details were foggy, but these fractured shards emerged:

  • He thinks the tree stood on the left near the wall as you enter the graveyard from the meetinghouse, but it was no longer standing when he became caretaker.
  • If it wasn’t a tree in the graveyard, it was definitely a tree somewhere on the meetinghouse grounds.
  • The body was in the branches of the tree, not hanged.
  • He thinks Rachel Franck, a member of Meeting that lived just south of the graveyard, used to mention the man in the tree occasionally.
  • He was buried in Strangers Row.

This last detail caught me by surprise. I spent the first seventeen years of my life in that graveyard, but I’d never heard of Strangers Row.

They were not all strangers, he explained. That’s where they buried non-Quakers, across the lane from the oldest section of the graveyard (Perhaps called “strangers” to distinguish them from Friends?). Most of them were known members of the community, they just weren’t members of Meeting. However, he said that there were more graves whose occupants were in fact unknown.

At this point I reached the limit of my tolerance for half-remembered ambiguities, and I decided to find some documentary evidence. I tracked down a list of graves on Interment.net (provided, I should mention, by my grandfather who has been in charge of the graveyard for decades) and found some promising leads. Of the 21 “Unknowns” two stuck out:

  • d. 10/28/1880, stranger found dead, Sect. B-6-4
  • d. 7/21/1913, man found in woods, Sect. B-9-13

Could one of these be the man found dead in a tree? I headed to the graveyard to investigate.

Strangers Row

I came looking for a row of headstones, but what I found challenged a basic principle of my mental geography of the graveyard. Strangers Row was empty. My whole live I assumed that every grave had a headstone, but this open patch of lawn was full of graves, unmarked and unknown.

Headstones are expensive, and even today new graves might be marked with temporary tags for years before a proper stone is installed (In this section I actually found a weathered plastic grave tag for Oscar Carter, deceased 1904). Whether they lacked the family ties or money, these strangers’ graves were left without a permanent mark.

Analyzing the list of the dead, I made a startling discovery. It seemed like a disproportionate number of the dead in Strangers Row were children.

I started counting.

In the first three rows, 74 of the graves are specifically listed as children, while only 67 are not. I doubt this can be explained by higher child mortality rates alone. A more likely explanation is that these children belonged to families who were not permanent residents of the community. Sometime after the children died, the families moved on and were buried elsewhere. Furthermore, many of the adults buried had unique surnames, indicating that they were not related by birth or marriage to the members of Solebury Friends Meeting. To further complicate things, one plot (d. 6/7/1886, baby from home in Philadelphia) suggests that perhaps the meeting took some bodies in for charity.

Four Unknowns

I now knew that to find my buried strangers I’d have to identify unmarked graves. I would have to triangulate their location by referencing graves with legible names. I loaded the Interment.net grave listing on my Android phone and went about identifying headstones close to the unmarked graves, narrowing in on my target by the row and plot number. In a few minutes, I found the graves of my two best leads:

Stranger Found Dead 1880

Man Found Dead in Woods 1913

Does one of these graves belong to the man found dead in a tree? Was the story my father and I remembered a corrupted retelling of a man simply found in the woods in 1913? Or was he one of the other unknowns, listed only as a question mark on the record of graves? My father and grandfather had no further information. Maybe some other old timer at Meeting knows the answer. For now, my leads have gone cold.

While I was at it, I also looked up two more intriguing unknowns, listed as “Irish Woman” and “Boy Drowned in Canal”:

Irish Woman and Boy Drowned in Canal

How did these two come to rest at Solebury Friends Meeting? No dates are provided. The first stone between them belongs to William Fennell, also undated. The other two Fennells were buried in 1871 and 1881, so it’s reasonable to guess that William died around the late 1800’s. The rest of the plots surrounding them are also undated, and almost all belong to children. Of these children, four have parents buried here, and those parents’ dates of death range from 1867 to 1906. This places the children’s deaths in the mid- to late 1800’s.

What events brought them here? Why were they identified only by ethnicity and manner of demise? For now these reticent strangers will keep their secrets.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite headstones, belonging to their fellow cemetery residents, 24-year-old Austin H. Cowdrick (d.12/6/1881):

“Unceasingly floweth the cold cold tide, of Death’s dark and lonly [sic] river.

And he whom the Boatman carrieth o’er Returneth oh never never.”