Tragic Events

Three hundred years ago this part of the Granary Burying Ground was soggy from many underground springs, leaving tombs waterlogged and, as grass grew quickly, prompting Boston selectmen to rent the ground as pasture to gravedigger James Williams, who was required to repair any damage caused by his cows. By 1740 gravediggers said the burial ground was so crowded that the dead were sometimes buried four deep, and in 1795 physicians warned that the packed graves and the exhalations from opening them threatened public health and made it nearly impossible to dig new graves without disturbing earlier burials. Among the tragedies and notable burials connected with the ground were the 1728 duel in which young Harvard graduate Benjamin Woodbridge was stabbed by Henry Phillips after a quarrel at the Royal Exchange tavern and died the next day, the burial of patriot lawyer James Otis after a tavern blow in 1769 ended his career and lightning killed him in 1783, and the graves or tombs of Revolutionary surgeon Dr. David Townshend, historian and abolitionist Rev. Jeremy Belknap, schoolmasters John Tileston and Rufus Webb, Esther Lovering, merchant Samuel Black, and Captain William Claghorn, whose epitaph mourned his sudden death in Boston in 1793.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States