It was in the 1960s that Dr. Emil Guber reported the 1798 stone, which is now missing. Many people have noted the absence of two other markers they would expect to find in this cemetery. Although Captain Absalom Boston’s first two wives and many of his children—including Absalom Jr., who died in infancy—have headstones, there are none for Absalom himself or for Hannah Cook Boston, who briefly survived her husband. So far as can be determined, the graves of Absalom and Hannah were never marked. When they died in the mid-1850s, Nantucket’s whaling economy was in ruins, and the substantial Boston family fortune was evaporating. Their surviving children included Absalom’s married daughter by an earlier marriage and two teen-aged sons, none of whom had the resources to purchase headstones for Absalom and Hannah.
Other notable figures from Nantucket history do have markers that have survived to the present, however. Among them is Arthur Cooper, a fugitive from slavery in Virginia who found protection for himself and his family among Nantucket’s Quakers. In time Arthur became a founding member and an elder of Nantucket’s Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church. Sadly, his wife Mary did not survive long after their move to Nantucket. Arthur remarried, and his second wife—Lucy Gordon Cooper—was also a refugee from slavery. She was remembered by neighborhood children as bearing a brand on her forehead from when she had been stolen from Africa and sold to the owner of a rice plantation. When Arthur Cooper was laid to rest next to his first wife Mary, each grave was marked with a prominent headstone. Lucy lived on for decades after Arthur, and when she finally took her place on his other side, it was two white neighbor children who took it upon themselves to raise money to purchase a headstone for her to match those of Mary and Arthur.
It has been in that Nantucket spirit that a bi-racial, multi-ethnic group of Nantucketers are now placing the bronze plaque in the old burial ground. Recognizing that the information on the wooden sign, which has weathered to near illegibility, was also factually wrong, the group discussed over a period of several years what sort of marker should replace the wooden sign, and what it should say. The group concluded that it should be extremely durable and as impervious as possible to theft. The Nantucket Conservation Foundation’s marker at the nature preserve on North Beach Street provided a model of a bronze plaque on a natural boulder, and Nantucketer Augie Ramos offered a substantial boulder and equipment to move it to the old cemetery.
In the town’s official death records, the burial ground has been consistently entered as the “Coloured Cemetery.” Recently in the utility companies’ street atlas, it has been labeled Mill Hill Cemetery, and so it now appears in Nantucket Historical Association records. To get the sense of the community’s preference for a name, Town Clerk Catherine Flanagan Stover plans to place the issue as an item in the warrant for the next Town Meeting. Whatever the outcome, the wording on the bronze plaque will remain accurate, since it simply describes the place as a “Historic Cemetery,” which it most assuredly is.
Based on the research of Emil Guba, Frances Karttunen, Barbara White, and Barbara White’s Cyrus Peirce Middle School students, the text was agreed upon and presented to the Nantucket Cemetery Commission’s workgroup. With the workgroup’s recommendation, the project was taken to the Board of Selectmen and approved. The Nantucket Historical Association accepted donations toward the cost of the bronze plaque; NHA trustee Isabel Carter Stewart, whose family members are interred in the cemetery, took on the task of collecting contributions; and the necessary funds were raised from local donors in a matter of weeks. The donors and Augie Ramos will receive public thanks this week as the new marker is unveiled.
Immediately after the unveiling on Saturday morning, a free guided public tour of the cemetery will be offered, with a second one at 1 p.m. At 4 p.m. in the near-by African Meeting House on the corner of Pleasant and York Street Dr. Jasmine Waddell will present the 2007 James Bradford Ames Lecture, “Black and Tan: Contemporary Black Experiences on Nantucket.” On Sunday, June 24, one more guided cemetery tour will be offered at 2 p.m.
