HOLLIS –
The Rev. John Terry has a gravestone in his office, which is
built over the town’s first graveyard.
The broken headstone from the 1700s, propped against a
bookshelf near the door, is a reminder of the integral part
the cemetery at the Congregational Church of Hollis has played
in both church and town history.
The names of local streets recall the names of many
families whose members lie in the cemetery, including Blood,
Brown, Colburn, Dow, Farley, Hardy, Howe, Jewett, Lund, Nevins
(Nevens), Pierce, Proctor, Runnels, Twiss, Wright and Wheeler.
Until the late 1700s, it was the only cemetery in town, and
is the final resting place of about 900 people, from civic and
religious leaders to the poor.
Perhaps the most important person buried there is one
without whom the town wouldn’t exist: the Rev. Daniel Emerson.
Emerson died 200 years ago this year, on Sept. 30, 1801, at
age 85.
“By 1741 there was enough of a small group to start the
church,” said Terry, the Monument Square church’s 21st pastor.
“To get a town charter (from England), you had to have a
church, had to have a minister,” he said. “That’s why Daniel
Emerson is so important. When he came, we had a church. And
when we had a church, we had a town.”
A lack of a pastor doomed the nearby town of Monson to
obscurity; it lost its charter in 1770 and was absorbed by
today’s Hollis, Brookline and Milford.
Emerson started his working life as a Harvard graduate
serving as a butler. He studied theology in graduate school
until Hollis called upon him in March 1743. He was ordained
the next month.
Though his flat tombstone has begun to weather away, much
of the inscription is still legible and praises his honesty,
hospitality, kindness, patriotism and “unusually successful”
preaching and ministerial skills.
He worked with “unabating love for the cause of Christ
until nature failed and he fell asleep in Jesus Sept. 30,” the
stone states.
There are stories on other gravestones, such as that of
80-year-old Moses Thurston, who was “at a religious conference
April 6th 1800. While addressing the throne of grace, being
fervently engaged, was called into eternity and without
struggle or groan resigned his spirit to God who gave it.”
But some stones tell no tales. A rich town history with
records in the Hollis Social Library, just steps from the
cemetery, relates stories of engaging and fascinating
personalities.
The gravestone in Terry’s office was removed from the
ground, presumably when the addition was built in 1965. The
knee-high gray stone bears the name of Samuel Jewett, but
other information has worn or broken off. Town historical
records indicate Jewett could have been one of the town’s
earliest settlers, a quirky apple grower, or possibly a child
who died young.
The first Samuel Jewett settled in Hollis around 1748 with
his brother, Nathaniel. A Massachusetts native born in 1694,
Samuel Jewett maintained land in the area of the current
134-139 Dow Road. He died in 1753, father to 11 children, and
was buried in the town cemetery.
His son, Samuel Jewett Jr., was born in 1725. According to
a compilation of historical documents edited by Joan Child
Tinklepaugh, this Mr. Jewett “developed an apple known as the
Jewett Red or Jewett.”
In Hollis, the Jewett apple was called “Nodhead” because
Mr. Jewett had the habit of nodding his head while walking or
talking. A Revolutionary War veteran who fought in Cambridge
and at Bunker Hill, he fathered eight children and died in
1791.
But because the Jewett stone appears to have been much
shorter and narrower than the mostly large, 4- to 5-foot-high
slabs still standing at the cemetery, Terry thinks it may have
belonged to a child. Historical records tell of a Samuel
Jewett born to Samuel Jewett Jr. in 1756. He was the fourth of
Jewett’s eight children, but his date of death and burial are
unrecorded, and he was not presumed to have been buried in the
churchyard cemetery.
Gravestone inscriptions, however, aren’t the only source of
cemetery stories.
In 1923 the church burned down, and a portion of the
cemetery was uprooted in the consequent redevelopment. Some
remains were moved to other cemeteries, and evidently many of
the stones were rearranged as well.
Walking through the cemetery on a recent crisp, fall day,
Terry pointed to the row of stones at the front of the
cemetery. Their high, unfinished backs, with still-visible
quarry marks, stand against the stone wall that separates the
churchyard from the paved driveway.
The stones, though, face another row of stones a few feet
away and more than a dozen additional rows.
There isn’t room between the two rows of stones for all
those remains. So the bodies may or may not all be there.
Even the decorations on the stones, such as skulls, weeping
willows and angel faces, are unique.
Some of the Hollis churchyard’s angels – who typically look
dour or distraught in cemeteries of similar age – are smiling.
“Evidently the guy who did the stones liked Hollis,” Terry
said. “So he put smiley faces on them.”
In the Smith family plot at the far back end of the
cemetery, the gravestone of Anna, who died in 1761, bears a
sad angel. On the gravestone of her mother, Elizabeth, the
angel smiles, as does that of her father, Elias, the village
blacksmith. Her sister, Mary, who died at age 25, in the same
year as her sister and father, has a stone bearing a sad
angel.
Here are a few other stories the serene churchyard holds:
n The first burial in the church was that of the young
Abraham Taylor, who donated the land to the town (then West
Dunstable) for a church, burial ground and town common in
1742. He died the next year at 36.
-- The town’s first white settlers, Peter and Anna Keyes
Powers, who were established in Hollis by 1731, are buried
side by side with inscriptions recalling their pioneering
spirit.
-- Several of the five Nevins brothers, who according to
legend were working on a stone that they dropped when called
to fight in the Revolutionary War, may be buried in the
cemetery. The stone they left unfinished lies today on the
Town Common, inlaid with a memorial to the town’s 92 Minutemen
who marched to Lexington, Mass., from the common on April 19,
1775.
William Nevins Jr. fought at Bunker Hill, was taken
prisoner and died on a prison ship in New York in 1776 at age
30. Joseph Nevins Sr. survived the war to became a virulent
opponent of the Jefferson administration. He died in 1811 at
age 63. Younger brother Phineas Nevins died at age 17 in the
Battle of Bunker Hill. John Nevins disappeared from his
company after being wounded and was never seen again. Benjamin
Nevins survived the war. Only the burial of Joseph Nevins at
the cemetery is confirmed.
-- The last burial in the cemetery was the 1978 interment
of the Rev. William C. Sipe, the congregation’s 14th minister.
Lauren Roth can be reached at 249-3342.
