A Little Piece of Connecticut in Maine

I have a fascination with cemeteries bordering on obsession. I grew up in central Connecticut where old cemeteries were everywhere. Old, as in 250 plus years old. My hometown has several. Our town of Rocky Hill has a really good cemetery filled with brownstone gravestones. Surrounding towns have them.

One of the things that interested me (and still does) is the material used for gravestones in Connecticut. It’s commonly called brownstone. It’s all over the place in Connecticut. It’s a sandstone that ranges in color from a rusty color all the way to a purplish-brown. There are different grades of hardness, the rusty colored stone generally being softer, and the purplish stone harder.

What older brownstone does when exposed to the elements for centuries is that it spalls. A good example is the gravestone of the Avery children. The outer surface becomes harder but the layers directly underneath get soft, in the same way that old brick can do. After years of this erosion, the harder surface will fall apart and potholes will develop on the surface of the stone, destroying the inscription and artwork. Lots of Connecticut cemeteries are full of stones that were intact a century ago but now are totally illegible.

Because of this, I have always been able to spot these brownstone gravestones. One startling example is in Monmouth, Maine, where my family and I lived for eight years. Next door to the church was a cemetery that dates from the 1790’s, which for that part of Maine is about as old as they get. In the oldest section in the front are a number of graves simply marked by a flat piece of rock. Some have initials and a date, some just initials, and some have no markings at all. This indicates that there were no trained gravestone carvers in the fledgling community, and families used whatever they could to mark the grave of a loved one.

In the very front row of this cemetery is a pair of brownstone gravestones that would easily blend in in a Connecticut cemetery but which stand out dramatically in the cemetery in Monmouth. My thanks go to Bobbie Bowler of Monmouth who sent me photos of the gravestones. They mark the graves of Samuel Avery and two of his children. Samuel, whose wife was named Jerusha, Samuel was born on May 12, 1774 in Groton, Connecticut, son of William and Mary Avery, and died at the age of 26 on June 8, 1799. Samuel Avery and Jerusha Arnold were married on June 26, 1796 in New London, Connecticut,

Gravestone of Samuel Avery, Monmouth, Maine
Photos courtesy of Bobbie Bowler

across the river from Groton. I am distantly related to them, also having Avery ancestry through my mother. Their children are buried next to Samuel: Sally, age 8 months and 19 days, died on February 17, 1799. Samuel, age one year, died on March 1, 1799. Clearly, the two children died of an illness that swept through the household that winter. Did Samuel die so young of the same illness, lingering for months? We don’t know. Jerusha died the same year, on November 27, and is buried in the Cedar Grove Cemetery in New London.

I have wondered what the cause of Samuel's death was. Was it accidental, or illness? Recently I came across his will online and it confirms that he was ill for over a month prior to his death. His will of April 23, 1799, in Kennebec County Probate records, is brief and reads as follows:

In the name of GOD amen

I Samuel Avery of Monmouth and County of Kennebec and Commonwealth of Massachusetts being weak in body, but of sound and perfect mind and memory, blessed be Almighty GOD for the same, do make and publish this my last Will and Testament, in manner & form following (which is to say) I give and bequeath unto my beloved Wife Jerusha Avery, all my Estate real and personal, of what kind name or nature four, and wherever to be found and I hereby appoint John Arnold of New London and County of New London, and State of Connecticut Merchant, sole Executor of this my last Will and testament, hereby revoking all former Wills by me made.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and seal this twenty third day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and ninety nine.

His executor was John Arnold, a merchant of New London, and his father-in-law. This is important because it confirms that the couple's New London family was actively in contact with them, and Arnold was undoubtedly the person who arranged for the gravestones.

Gravestone of Avery children, Monmouth, Maine

A tragic ending for a young family, to be sure. It’s not surprising that Jerusha would die so soon after losing both of her children and her husband. The stress she undoubtedly experienced in her grief could have been enough to kill her. Did she move back to Connecticut to be with her family after their deaths? Probably. In that part of Maine at that time marriage prospects would have been minimal, and a single woman would have been in some danger.


It is clear that Samuel and Jerusha came from a family with means. In a cemetery that at the time had nothing but flatrocks for gravestones the two brownstone gravestones would have stood out. Here was a young couple who moved their two children to a remote place. Was it for speculation in land? It wouldn’t be surprising. Whatever the reason, when Samuel and the children died someone clearly arranged for gravestones to be made in Connecticut and shipped up. That in itself would have been an undertaking. Shipping them by sea wouldn’t be difficult. They would have come up the Kennebec River and unloaded at Hallowell or Augusta, the transported by land. Given the lack of roads that alone would have been a major undertaking, done at great cost.

Gravestone of Jerusha Avery, Cedar Grove Cemetery,
New London, Connecticut
 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/83985082/jerusha-avery

There they lie buried in a foreign place. It’s a story that has been lived out again and again. Young people pick up and move to a new place for adventure, in pursuit of wealth, or just to get away from civilization. Whatever their reason for going to Maine, they left behind two little pieces of Connecticut in the place that brought them only hardship and death.

Jerusha's stone, made out of Connecticut brownstone, has suffered the same fate as that of her children. Most of the face of the stone is gone, and only cemetery records now indicate who is buried there. There she lies, forgotten to most.

O Who Hath Caused This?

William Blake, Pestilence: Death of the First Born, 1805

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppresed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!

William Blake, Prologue, intended for a Dramatic Piece of King Edward the Fourth

This is one of my favorite poems, although I have many, many favorite poems, many by Shakespeare. I find it arresting. The imagery is striking. I can see a huge dragon flapping its wings over a battlefield. Blake's question, "O who hath caused this?" is the eternal question in war. Whose fault is it? Nations will usually come up with blame for the other side. "They did it first!" That doesn't matter, in this scenario. Nations engage in war for less than honorable reasons. Wars come about through the failure of nations to be reasonable. Wars happen when nations think short-term rather than long term. World War II, for example. My father is a veteran of the European theatre. He was nearly killed in a rocket attack in London. The war was a necessary one, but only because the West supported Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Many in the US held eugenics to be a legitimate science--the belief that some races are superior to others. Where did Hitler get that idea? He got it from us.

The bottom line is always who suffers the most. The common soldiers suffer the most. The civilian populations suffer the most. The heads of state and the generals, who assign their sons to a general's staff far away from danger, do not suffer.

As long as nations choose to short circuit diplomacy and go to war, common people will suffer. They will die on battlefields or starve at home.

Our current regime is rattling a saber at a frightening pace. Today President Drumpf called for a military parade in Washington. Such a parade would cost millions of dollars and would fly in the face of concerns about excessive government spending. It would be a demonstration of his own bloated sense of power. Military dictatorships such as the Soviet Union, East Germany and Romania used to put on such parades. So does North Korea. Is this what we want to become? Every day Drumpf is resembling more and more a dictator such as Stalin, who demanded worship from the mindless masses and tolerated no dissent. God help us.

I don't think comparisons of Drumpf to Hitler are quite accurate. I see Stalin as a better comparison. For your perusal I offer a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, in which he  describes the compulsory applause for Comrade Stalin at the 1937 Party Congress that went on for a long time:

A district party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference with every mention of his name). The hall echoed with “stormy applause, raising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who adored Stalin. However, who would dare to be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them'

The director of the local paper factor, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter… Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! 

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

Take it a day at a time

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.

’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

    So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,

    You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 55

Shakespeare's profound words raise the most uncomfortable issue of all in human existence--that nothing lasts for ever, not even us. He seems optimistic, though, that memory will suffice in keeping one's existence alive. A recent article suggests that the cultural malaise that we seem to be in--of unhappiness, stems from our habitual overuse of electronics.  The cure--get out and do something. Talk to people. Go to church, read a book, take a walk, do something.  I believe this is true. Countless times I have seen couples eating out who are both scanning their phones, presumably on Facebook, looking for the perfect post--the one that will fulfill all desire, that will make them ultimately happy. The sad truth is that it will never come. Nothing available online will finally satisfy that eternal quest for ultimate meaning. Vaguebooking and coming up with nothing substantial only makes the user more unhappy because he or she never finds what they are looking for. It's the modern permutation of channel surfing.

Shakespeare wrote at the end of the Renaissance, when the English Renaissance was coming to a close and the even flashier Baroque era was ramping up. A preoccupation of the Renaissance was the realization of mortality. Shakespeare's poetry, whether in the sonnets or his plays, echos that preoccupation.

I believe the root of unhappiness in contemporary society lies in our refusal to acknowledge death as a part of life. We've made some progress in that regard. Hospice is now widespread, almost universal in the U.S., and helps the family and the patient both to ease into the next world. But we're still unhappy. Certainly the death of a young person (I'll let you decide what is "young") seems unjust, but we have come to see all of death as unfair and unjust, as though we somehow had a guarantee of everlasting life without pain.

It seems to me that some people go through life always hoping for something more. Perhaps all of us do that to one extent or another. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. "My soul shall not rest until it rests in you," Augustine wrote to God in his Confessions. By nature we are always looking ahead to what is better. Unfortunately that can easily translate into never being satisfied with anything in life. That's not a happy way to exist, yet many people do exactly that. Balance this with the sense of entitlement that life should be trouble-free and you have a recipe for unhappiness. Serious unhappiness. Take it a day at a time.