Family Memorials

Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1707 to Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler, and his second wife, Abiah Folger Franklin, later created a modest memorial to his parents praising their fifty-five years of marriage, their constant labor and honest industry in maintaining a large family, and their piety, prudence, discretion, and virtue; after the inscription had worn away by the 1820s, the City of Boston replaced it in 1827 with the current Quincy granite obelisk. Though recognized early for extraordinary intelligence, Franklin received only two years of formal schooling before leaving school at age 10 to make soap and candles in his father’s business, and at age 12 he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer whose trade better suited Franklin’s love of books and ideas; his first article appeared anonymously in 1721, and he left Boston in 1723 after a serious quarrel with his brother. In the Granary Burial Ground, many gravestones provide the only surviving record of early Bostonians, especially women and children, reflecting the high mortality of infancy and childbirth in colonial Boston: Anne Child Franklin, Josiah Franklin’s first wife, is memorialized with three of her seven children; Mary Hayfield Cobham lies beside her daughter-in-law Deborah and her son Moses Cobham; and Hannah Adams Holbrook Dyer survived two husbands and, after Henry Dyer’s death, took over his position as overseer of the almshouse next to the burying ground. The burial ground also holds figures connected to the Revolution and imperial conflict, including Richard Draper, Tory printer of the Boston Newsletter, whose wife Margaret continued the paper until departing Boston with British troops in March 1776; Captain Nicholas Gardner, who fought in the American Revolution and was mortally wounded at age 33; Gershom Flagg, a housewright whose family buried him there after his death in 1771; and Elisha Brown, whose epitaph honors his successful resistance in October 1769 to a whole British regiment attempting to drive him from his legal habitation.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States