SOME OLD NEW HAMPSHIRE BURIAL PLACES.
THE first one I visited is on the bank of the Merrimack, close to Thornton's Ferry, in Litchfield, and there is no fence or wall of any kind to make it an enclosure. The west side is a precipitous bank, some forty feet high, descending to the Merrimack. The river washes on this side very fast, and what was once a large burial place, has now become a narrow strip, not quite twenty feet wide in its widest part. Some fifteen or twenty years ago, changing currents and eddies began to wash out the bones of the men and women buried here, by the murmuring Merrimack. Not much attention was paid to it, however, until an entire coffin—some later burial—was washed out, went floating down the river, and lodged on a jutting point of land, some half mile below. Then, those people who had any kith or kin—however distant—interred here, removed them. The excavations thus made have never been filled up, and it makes an unsightly place. There are nearly always bones here in sight, from graves, doubtless, which were never marked by stones, or the stones have crumbled from age. Two large leg bones were bleaching in the sun at my first visit. At my next, I found some one had covered them with an old cloth; but there were several small bones scattered around in the sand.
For the sake of common decency, some place should be provided where the remains of what were once men and women, and who received Christian burial, might be interred as fast as they appear.
Some seven or eight visible graves are all that now remain. Of these, nearly all the stones have become so defaced and crumbled away, that I was only able to obtain the following inscriptions by scratching off the moss with a stick and standing back a little distance from them:—
"MARGARET, DAU OF [This name was entirely gone.]
AND MARGARET MC.QUESTIN.
DIED 1665."
This woman lived in the days when wives were brought over from England to the Colonists, and sold for tobacco. Who knows but she was one of these? I stood beside her lowly bed, and looked on the river, dancing and rippling by in the sunshine on its way to the ocean, and thought of the mighty changes since she looked last upon its waters. It seems almost sacrilege that her dust should not be allowed to rest quietly until the resurrection. The other inscription was:—
"JAMES MCCALLY.
DIED
1749."
These McCallys came from Ireland, and were among the first settlers of New Hampshire. The son of this man, also named James, married a sister of General John Stark. While absent on some military expedition, he was exposed to small-pox. On his return he complained of a blister on his foot, which his wife pricked, contracting the malady herself.
In a few more years, there will be nothing left here to tell future generations that one of the old landmarks of the nation's infancy has been swept away.
