The grave of Henry Sargent (bottom) is about 100 feet from the grave of Sevilla Jones, whose family named him as the young woman’s killer. It’s etched on her tombstone up the hill near the white building.
The top part of the gravestone for Sevilla Jones, who died on Jan. 13, 1854, when she was 17. Her family put the details of her murder on her gravestone.
The grave of Henry Sargent (bottom) is about 100 feet from the grave of Sevilla Jones, whose family named him as the young woman’s killer. It’s etched on her tombstone up the hill near the white building.
The grave of Henry Sargent (bottom) is about 100 feet from the grave of Sevilla Jones, whose family named him as the young woman’s killer. It’s etched on her tombstone up the hill near the white building.
The grave of Henry Sargent (bottom) is about 100 feet from the grave of Sevilla Jones, whose family named him as the young woman’s killer. It’s etched on her tombstone up the hill near the white building.
DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER
In a italicized inscription on the grave of teenager Sevilla Jones, her family details her murder.
Some stories are buried too deeply to uncover, lost behind forgotten names and impersonal dates of birth and death.
It’s like a slightly macabre game of telephone: Things that began in sharp focus start to blur at the edges and then the meaning is gone.
But every now and then, if you dig deep enough into the past, you can uncover hints of lives lived before their mortal remains were laid to rest in graveyards all across New Hampshire.
Walk through Point of Graves cemetery — found in Portsmouth off Mechanic Street, near the heritage garden beds in Prescott Park — and there’s a lingering sense of something still guarding the time-worn stones.
It feels odd and even a big menacing.
“As many gravestones as I’ve seen, I still had shivers,” says Sue Hunt, who lives in Alexandria and is a longtime member of the New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association.
Genealogy has long fascinated Hunt, who jokes that while her maternal side has been traced back to the 1700s in Newport and Croydon, her father’s family were “latecomers,” arriving in the 1800s.
“My sister and I have been running through graveyards since we were little,” Hunt says. “Often graveyards have a center aisle so my dad would say, ‘OK, girls, here’s the name we are looking for. Marty, you take the left, and Sue, you take the right.’ And we’d have a race to see who could find the stone first.”
Still, Point of Graves sends a shiver down Hunt’s spine when puritan-era ideology stares out of etched, empty eye sockets.
Behind a wrought iron turnstyle gate are gravestones with crossbones beneath skulls or wings sprouting from the sides of skeletal faces.
Point of Graves was established in 1671 on land deeded to the town by Capt. John Pickering, according to the Portsmouth Historical Society.
The markers in the graveyard go from the 1600s through the 1800s, and represent some of the prominent residents in the city’s early history.
Those include William Partridge, a shipwright and early lieutenant governor, who died in 1718, as well as Capt. Joshua Lang Huntress, who died in 1802. Huntress was master at arms on the sloop Ranger, commanded by John Paul Jones, a pivotal figure in the Revolutionary War. (The Portsmouth History Society’s landmark 1758 John Paul Jones House is so named because Jones is believed to have rented a room in the then-boarding house in 1777.)
Grave situations
Across New Hampshire unusual headstones deal with murder, fatal accidents and poignant touches of affection.
Here are some of those intriguing stories:
Naming a killer
Tucked behind an old white house in New Boston Cemetery is the headstone of a 19th-century teenager who was killed as she was walking with her brother to school.
The top part of the gravestone for Sevilla Jones, who died on Jan. 13, 1854, when she was 17. Her family put the details of her murder on her gravestone.
DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER
She was 17 years and 9 months old.
Her family wanted to make sure she — and the vicious circumstances of her death — would never be forgotten, so they had this inscribed on her headstone:
“Sevilla, daughter of George and Sarah Jones, murdered by HENRY N. SARGENT, Jan. 13, 1854.”
Beneath that, in smaller, italicized letters, there is a description of that day:
The gravesite of Henry Sargent stands in New Boston Cemetery.
DAVID LANE/UNION LEADER
Thus fell this lovely blooming daughter
By the revengeful hand – a malicious Henry
When on her way to school he met her and with a six self-cocked pistol shot her.
Her murderer, who shot himself after putting four bullets into Sevilla, was buried in the same cemetery, less than 100 feet away.
A man’s best friend
William G. Bruce is buried to the side of an old stand of hardwood trees on the Greenlawn Cemetery in Mont Vernon.
His headstone says he was killed in an accidental shooting while hunting on Oct. 27, 1883, at age 64.
A statue of William G. Bruce’s beloved canine companion sits behind his 1883 gravestone in the Greenlawn Cemetery in Mont Vernon.
Graveyard dog
But it’s the statue behind the headstone that gives visitors a little lump in the throat.
On a rectangular stone pedestal, the statue of a dog with big floppy ears and a mournful posture comes into view. His head faces to the side as if he’s still on watch both for animals in the woods and his favorite human.
It’s an unusually personal gesture, likely commissioned by Bruce’s wife and family.
Risking life and limb
In a very different twist of tribute is a grave in the town cemetery in Washington.
It’s where Captain Samuel Jones supposedly had a funeral for his amputated leg.
According to the Historical Society of Cheshire County’s records, Jones was 26 when one of his legs got pinned between a fence and a structure he was helping to move.
In that day and age, some believed that a severed limb needed to be properly arranged and aligned in order to lessen the pain in the remaining portion of the limb.
So, Jones’s leg has its own gravestone to mark the date of the loss, July 7, 1801.
The Historical Society explains that while Jones moved to Rhode Island, where the rest of his body later was laid to rest, his leg remains in New Hampshire.
A vicious storm
Captain Sam Greele, a prominent member of the Wilton community, met his end in 1798 when a gust of wind sent a rotting tree crashing down on him, knocking him off his horse and killing him. He was 46.
An obelisk surrounded by a wrought-iron-looking fence surrounds the grave site in Vale End Cemetery in Wilton.
A sad end
Patty Ward, one of 11 children born to Reuben and Sarah Ward of Marlborough, met a sad end that unfortunately shows how precarious life was in earlier centuries.
Her bereft parents included these words on her gravestone in Marlborough’s Meeting House Cemetery: “By boiling water she was slain, whilst less than six years of age, then her exquisite racking pain removed her from the stage,” according to findagrave.com, a good resource in looking up names and locations of gravestones.
Eerily empty
Once in a while, it’s the lack of ornamentation that does the talking.
At the end of Fitch Road in Jaffrey, there’s a small wooden sign marked “Smallpox Cemetery.” But there are no headstones here.
Six people who died in 1792 were unceremoniously buried in a then-outlying area to lower the chance of spreading the infectious disease.
Their names now are inscribed on a marker that was dedicated in the mid-1980s: Eliza Danforth of Amherst; Honorable Captain Abel Wilder, one the most illustrious men of Winchendon, Mass.; Revolutionary War soldier Oliver Gould and 12-year-old Nancy Thorndike, both of Jaffrey; Enoch Thurber of Keene, age 23; and a Mr. Cambridge from Rindge.
Otherworldly experience
Barney and Betty Hill became the fodder of international fascination — books, movies and lots of critical speculation — after they claimed they were abducted and examined by extraterrestrials aboard a UFO in 1961 while coming home to Portsmouth from the White Mountains.
The couple is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Kingston, though their burial sites are much less marked now due to all the public interest over the years.
