“I don’t think that it would hurt anyone to live on an island…you get away from the hustle and bustle. You are not trying to keep up with the rest of the world, which is going too fast.”

— Dalton Reed, son of lighthouse keeper Nathan “Ad” Reed

The last cemetery we visited on Mount Desert Island was on the western side, Hillrest Cemetery.

That morning, we took a boat ride out to Little Cranberry Island and saw plenty of sea life along the way. Since it wasn’t far away, we also visited Bass Harbor Light and climbed on some more rocks.

You can’t go up into the lighthouse but you can get right up next to the western side. I noticed nearby there was a gravestone on the way to the parking lot. Wasn’t expecting that!

I looked Alford “Tom” Williams, Jr. up on Find a Grave and this stone is said to be a cenotaph. His obituary noted that he served in the U.S. Coast Guard for 30 years before retiring. He was a lieutenant of the Southwest Harbor Fire Department and active in the Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service.

My guess is that as a member of the Coast Guard, which managed this lighthouse, Tom was charged with helping care for it. That made me wonder what it was like to have spent so many years tending to such a rugged landmark.

Up the road from Bass Harbor Light is the Tremont area, near Southwest Harbor. This side of the island is much less touristy and offers a great deal of natural scenery that was lovely to take in as we drove along.

I found very little information about Hillrest Cemetery. According to Find a Grave, there are about 570 marked burials but only 40 percent are photographed. A new chain-link fence was put around it in 2011. From what I could see, it is well tended and in good shape. The cemetery sign, oddly, is located in the back instead of the front.

As is my custom, I take a number of pictures and research the people later. It was with much delight that I learned that I’d photographed the graves of a local lighthouse keeper and his wife.

Born on in 1857 in West Tremont, Maine, Nathan Adam “Ad” Reed was a young boy when he secured his first job aboard ship and by 19, he was officially a captain. Well known around the area, Ad commanded the schooners Abraham Richardson, Montezuma, Union, Lavinia Bell, and the C.B. Clark.

At 18, Ad met and married 17-year-old Emma Almira Mitchell. Within a year the couple had their first child and would eventually have 15 more.

While Ad loved his work, he didn’t like being away from his family. At the age of 45, he was thrilled to get the post of second assistant keeper for Maine’s Great Duck Island Lighthouse. He served in that capacity from 1902 to 1909, and then as first assistant keeper from 1909 to late 1911.

Located south of Mount Desert Island and the Cranberry Islands, Great Duck Island Lighthouse wasn’t built until 1890. Great Duck Island is estimated to support 20 percent of Maine’s seabird population. The island earned its name in the 1700s from a pond that attracted numerous ducks.

Because of Ad’s large family and four other children already living on the island, Ad insisted that the State of Maine provide for a formal education for the children. It took a while to get approval but eventually, an old storage building was remodeled and turned into a schoolhouse.

School teachers boarded with the families during their stints on the island. At one point, Rena Reed, the sixth of the Reed children, became the school’s teacher after earning her teaching certificate at Eastern Maine Normal School in Castine.

According to Ad’s son, Dalton, life at the lighthouse was often a challenge but the family always had plenty of food. Capt. Reed purchased 12 to 14 barrels of flour every fall, which was usually enough to get them through the winter months. Dalton said meat was a rarity, but they ate plenty of fresh fish and lobster. None of the children ever saw a doctor, and Emma Reed had her own remedies for every ailment.

In December 1911, Ad was promoted to head keeper at the Nash Island Lighthouse off the coast of South Addison, Maine. Although it was a much smaller light station than Great Duck Island and he had no assistants, Ad and his family were ready for the challenge. Sadly, three months later Ad became ill and had to leave Nash Island. He died in April 1912 at the age of 55 of Bright’s Disease (a kidney disorder).

A recent article in Lighthouse Digest offers a wonderfully detailed story about the lives of the Reeds while on Great Duck Island. You can read it here and see several photos of the Reed family.

After Great Duck Island Lighthouse was automated in 1986, the Coast Guard destroyed all but one of the keeper’s houses, as well as most of the outbuildings. In 1998, the 12 acres encompassing Great Duck Island Lighthouse became the property of Bar Harbor’s College of the Atlantic (COA) under the Maine Lights Program.

Emma Reed died 20 years after Ad. I could not find her in the U.S. Census records but she may have lived with one of her many children. She is buried beside Capt. Reed.

One of Ad and Emma’s daughters is buried at Hillrest. Lucy Leona Reed was born in 1892 and lived on Great Duck Island with her family. In 1913, she married streetcar conductor Benjamin Gott. They had two children together. In 1919, Lucy died at the age of 26 of unknown causes in Arlington, Mass.

Lucy’s epitaph reads:

One precious to our hearts has gone
The voice we loved is stilled
The place made vacant in our home
Can never more be filled.

The Lopaus family has 22 markers at Hillrest Cemetery. One obelisk stands for Capt. Andrew Lopaus, his wife, Rachel Milliken Lopaus and a son, Samuel Lopaus. Samuel was a sea captain like his father. He was lost at sea in 1865 at the age of 24. I could find nothing about the circumstances surrounding his death.

Of Andrew and Rachel’s six children, two other sons would carry on the maritime tradition. Born two years after Samuel, Alonzo Lopaus married Nancy Young in 1869. They had five children, three of whom lived to adulthood. Alonzo died at sea in 1887.

Brother Roscoe Lopaus was a lighthouse keeper, working on seven different islands in Maine and Massachusetts during his career. His first post was from 1881 to 1883 at Nash Island Light, where Capt. Nathan Reed finished the last three months of his career in 1911. Both Alonzo and Roscoe are buried at Hillrest.

I found these two unusual markers for another father and son as I was preparing to leave.

A native of Scotland, Tom Harkins came to America when he was 10 and later married Rhoda Dickens in 1906 in Maine. He worked as a stone carver until his death in 1950. Son Andrew Jackson “Jack” Harkins  carried on the tradition until his own death in 2000.

Finally, I found a sweet tribute to the cemetery’s caretaker, Alton Murphy. He is listed on another stone with other family members but this one was just for him. As it turns out, he was the son of Emmerata Lopaus Murphy. She was a daughter of Capt. Andrew and Rachel Lopaus, and sister of Samuel, Alonzo and Roscoe Lopaus.

Born in 1870, Alton never married and held various professions over the years, from sailor to fisherman to laborer. I don’t know how long he cared for Hillrest Cemetery but it was long enough for someone to want to commemorate his service with a marker.

Next time, I’ll wrap up our Maine adventure with a visit to Ellsworth’s Old Burying Grounds.

Places like last week’s Mount Desert Street Cemetery are true gems because they offer up a great combination of history and beautiful stones. But truth be told, most cemeteries are of a more mundane nature. You’re not always going to see a monument with a soldier on top or one with a intricately carved ship. However, that doesn’t make them any less special to the families with loved ones buried there.

I saw Otter Creek Cemetery on a map of Mount Desert Island, located just outside the entrance of the Blackwoods Campground in Acadia National Park. Only around 2,000 live in the Otter Creek area and probably fewer than that are there year round.

While the area is historically rooted in fishing and lobstering, Otter Creek was cut off from the waterfront in the 1930s when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought land along Otter Cove as part of his vision for Acadia National Park. Otter Creek is the only village on Mount Desert Island to be completely encircled by the park.

Since we already needed to go to Blackwoods Campground to get a stamp in Sean’s National Parks passport, we made a stop at Otter Creek Cemetery after doing that. The guys decided to stay in the car while I explored.

According to Find a Grave, the cemetery has about 425 burials. Not all are marked. It is still an active cemetery, with a number of recent burials. The surnames Bracy, Bunker, Davis, Richardson, and Walls are common among the stones.

This marker for George B. Saunders was familiar. There are several like it at the Mount Desert Street Cemetery so I think the “hand holding a bouquet” was a popular option sold by a local mason in the late 1800s.

Born in the Bucksport, Maine area, George Saunders married Elvira Jane Bracy in 1871. They had two children, Florence and Arthur. According to the 1880 U.S. Census, the family lived next door to Jane’s parents, Capt. David and Hannah Bracy. For reasons unknown, George died in 1882 at the age of 38.

Jane remarried, becoming the second wife of William H. Davis. Arthur Saunders is buried nearby with his wife, Vesta. Florence, who married Harold Liscomb, is also buried at Otter Creek. She died at the age of 27.

Capt. David and Hannah Bracy lived long lives and are buried at Otter Creek Cemetery as well. He is referred to as Deacon Bracy on his marker.

Their son, Lewis, is also buried at Otter Creek Cemetery. He was married to Cynthia Howard Bracy and they had at least three children. A sea captain, Lewis signed on in 1861 as a private with the 11th Maine Infantry, Company K to fight for the Union in the Civil War. He mustered out just a year later.

After his military service, records indicate Lewis was the master of the ship C.E. Howard (perhaps named after his wife, the former Cynthia Howard) when it was traveling down the Penobscot River from Bangor to the Cranberry Islands (just south of Mount Desert Island). He and his crew were caught in a storm near Bass Harbor and had to escape the sinking vessel before they went down with it. You can read his account of it here.

Lewis applied for a war pension in 1874 and received it. He would die only three years later in Cienfuegos, Cuba, which is about 160 miles from Havana. It was a bustling port city known for its good location on the trade route between Jamaica and South America. His cause of death is unknown. Cynthia did not remarry and applied to receive Lewis’ pension after he died. She died in 1911 and is buried in nearby Bunker Cemetery.

I saw another of David and Hannah Bracy’s children buried close to Lewis. Their next to last daughter, also named Hannah, was only five when she died in 1862.

I was intrigued by the monument for the Rev. Andrew Gray and his wife, Hannah Howard Gray. The marker notes that he was “ordained in the Ellsworth Quarterly Meeting” in 1871. Considering he was 48 at the time of his ordination, I was curious about his ministry.

The son of Josiah and Sarah Morey Gray, Andrew was born in Brookesville, Maine in 1823. He was converted to the Free Will Baptist faith at the age of 28, then licensed to preach in 1854 at the age of 31. Why his ordination took place so many years later is unknown.

According to the Free Baptist Cyclopaedia, Rev. Gray had four pastorates and had baptized 83 converts by 1887. One account that I read described him as “a man so illiterate he could not write his own name, but one of strong personality, whose ministry wrought a great improvement to Otter Creek.” His arrival in the area took place in 1872, soon after his ordination.

Elizabeth Gray Grover was one of the Rev. Andrew and Hannah Gray’s children. She is buried beside her husband, Gideon. Her marker is one of the most intricate in the cemetery and strikes a chord since she was only 20 when she died.

Elizabeth married Gideon Grover when she was in her teens. She had their daughter, Elnora, in 1875. She died three years later for unknown reasons. Gideon died 21 years later in 1892 at the age of 48. I don’t know if he ever remarried.

Three little graves grouped together were the children of Captain. William Bunker and his wife, Mary Bracy Bunker. She was also one of Capt. David and Hannah Bracy’s children. Hattie Belle, Lewis A., and an unnamed infant all died between 1880 and 1882.

William and Mary’s final child, Alberta, was born in 1888. She did not share the same fate as her siblings and lived a long life. She died in 1975 at the age of 87.

Our Maine adventure is nearing its end but there are still two cemeteries to visit on our journey. Come back next time for more from the Pine Tree state!

The final days of our Maine adventure were devoted to exploring Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park. On our way from Camden, we made two stops. The first was the Penobscot Narrows Bridge and Observatory in Prospect. It’s one of only four bridge observatories in the world, the others being in China, Thailand, and Slovakia. Taller than the Statue of Liberty at 420 feet high (42 stories), it offers amazing views of the Penobscot River and surrounding area.

Only a short walk away is Fort Knox, a must see since we visited Henry Knox’ grave just the day before. Fort Knox was established in 1844 to protect the Penobscot River valley against a possible future British naval incursion following the War of 1812. Troops were garrisoned there in 1863 to 1866 and briefly during the Spanish American war in 1898, but Fort Knox never saw military action.

I didn’t glimpse another cemetery until later in the day after we’d arrived in Bar Harbor and had taken a bus tour of much of Mount Desert Island/Acadia National Park. My husband had to park the car some distance from where we caught the bus because in late June, Bar Harbor is packed with tourists.

On our walk back to the car, we stopped at a cemetery nestled between two fine looking churches. One is St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church (established in 1877) and the other is the Bar Harbor Congregational Church (established in 1883). St. Saviour’s boasts some beautiful Tiffany stained glass windows that I glimpsed from the cemetery.

The land was donated for the purpose of being a cemetery by Jonathan Rodick. Previously called the Rodick Family Burial Ground, it is now known as the Mount Desert Street Cemetery. A sign on the property refers to it as the Village Burying Grounds. Burials were taking place here before 1790 and many are unmarked.

The largest object in the cemetery is the Union monument dedicated in 1897. It was designed and built by the firm of Cook & Watkins of Boston, with granite supplied by N.H. Higgins of Ellsworth, Maine. It cost $4,500, with $4,000 paid by the Town of Bar Harbor and $500 from public subscription.

You’ll notice that the monument says “In Memory of Eden’s Sons Who Were Defenders of the Union.” First settled by Europeans in 1763 by Israel Higgins and John Thomas, Bar Harbor was incorporated on Feb. 23, 1796 as Eden. It was named after Sir Richard Eden, an English statesman. I couldn’t find when exactly Eden became Bar Harbor but it’s possible it happened before Maine became a state in 1820.

While this cemetery is a small one, it drove home something that I hadn’t really thought about before. Mothers of this era were painfully aware that their children might die in infancy or childhood due to a variety of illnesses, as the gravestone below testifies. But the mother of a sea captain had to worry that while her infant son may have avoided diphtheria, he could easily be dragged to a watery grave in his 20s.

Probably the most eye-catching marker in the cemetery is for Captain James Hamor. I’d now seen quite a few monuments featuring sailing ships, but this one has to be among the best I’ve seen. The detail is quite intricate.

Born in Bar Harbor in 1794, James Hamor was the son of David and Experience Thompson Hamor. The land upon which the current Bar Harbor Congregational Church building now sits was once owned by Capt. Hamor. He donated it with the purpose of the town using it to build a school on, which it did.

James married Clarissa Rodick in 1822. I’m not sure if they had any children. He served as postmaster at different times throughout the 1850s and 1860s.

Capt. Hamor’s epitaph reads:

He’ll ride no more the billows
Nor o’er the rolling wave
He has performed life’s final voyage
And anchored in the grave.

Capt. Hamor died at the age of 79 in 1873. Clarissa, who is buried beside him, died in 1888 at the age of 85.

The Higgins name features prominently in Eden/Bar Harbor history. According to Find a Grave, there are close to 70 people with Higgins in their name buried at the cemetery.

Son of town founder Israel Higgins and Mary “Polly” Snow Higgins, Capt. Israel Higgins, Jr. shares a stone with his wife, Mary “Polly” Hull Higgins. They had seven children, of which three lived well into adulthood (Stephen, Royal, and Sophia). Although Israel was lost at sea, there is no ship on his marker. Instead, it is topped by a winged hourglass and decorated midway down with two clasped hands.

The inscription notes that the stone was erected by Capt. R. G. Higgins and S. Higgins. I assume this was Israel and Polly’s son Royal Grant Higgins and his first wife, Sarah.

Israel was considered a master mariner and served as an Eden selectman in 1802, 1803, and 1809. He was in command of the schooner Julia Ann (his son Seth was also aboard), thought to be the first ship built in Bar Harbor in 1809. Israel and Seth died at sea on March 29, 1823 about 25 miles south of Sandy Hook, N.J., which is about 600 miles south of Bar Harbor.

Another of Israel and Polly’s sons, Capt. Stephen Higgins, is buried nearby. While there is an anchor on his marker, nothing indicates that he died at sea. I could find out very little about him. Son Jonathan did die at sea in June 1824 aboard the brig William on a voyage from Havana, Cuba to Portland, Maine. He was 24 years old.

This came less than a year after the death of his father. Polly had died before these two heartbreaking events took place.

Amid all the white stones, I did find a traditional slate one that was similar to many I saw at Eastern Cemetery in Portland. The son of Moses and Mary Day, John W. Day was 24 when he died in 1848. It features the familiar weeping willow and urn at the top.

The rain was conspiring against us so we headed on to the car, but my thoughts of that cemetery stayed with me. So many modern comforts have come to Bar Harbor since that seafaring era. Cell phones, fast food, fast cars. News came much more slowly then, such as word that someone’s ship had been torn apart in a storm or was splintered against a rocky shore in the darkness.

Weeping and sorrow surely followed as families prepared caskets and attended funerals. But alongside that grief must have rested a stoic acceptance that while the sea often swept some of Eden’s finest sons away, it kept the town alive and thriving. To stop accepting the challenge the ocean waves offered would deny their only livelihood, despite the fact she was often a painfully harsh mistress.

I’m not done with Bar Harbor just yet. There’s much more to come.

“One hour we saw him in full life, standing in the midst of us in the pride and vigor of manhood; the next, a helpless, inanimate corpse.”

— Rep. John Fairfield, Feb. 26, 1838, The Congressional Globe Index

This week, I’ve moved over to Elm Grove Cemetery to complete my series on these two Thomaston, Maine cemeteries. While Elm Grove has far fewer burials than Thomaston Village Cemetery, the stories there are just as amazing.

You’ve probably figured out that I often do my research when I’m in the process of writing a blog post. Not right after a cemetery visit. So it was with much surprise that I found out this week that one of my subjects had died fighting a duel.

The most famous (or rather infamous) person buried at Elm Grove is the Honorable Jonathan Longfellow Cilley, who served as a Congressman. That alone is noteworthy. He was only 36 when he died, his life snuffed out by a duel that set Washington, D.C. in an uproar for months afterward.

A native of New Hampshire, Cilley studied law at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine as a member of the class of 1825 with fellow students Nathaniel Hawthorn and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was also close with future President Franklin Pierce, who was a year behind them.

After college, Cilley decided to further his law studies in Thomaston with John Ruggles (who would later become known as the “father of the U.S. Patent Office”). He was admitted to the bar in 1828 and began practicing law on his own.

While boarding at the home of Hezekiah Prince, Cilley met and fell in love with his landlord’s daughter, Deborah. They married in April 1829 and would have five children, three that would live to adulthood.

Cilley also edited the Thomaston Register from 1829 to 1831, getting a taste for politics. He eventually represented Thomaston in the Maine House of Representatives from 1831 to 1836, serving as Speaker during in his final two years. His friend John Ruggles also served as a state representative from 1823-1831.

Cilley was elected to the 25th Congress as a Democrat in 1836 and began his duties in March 1837. During this time, majority Democrats were fighting with minority Whigs about the response to the Panic of 1837. Beneath this conflict was bitterness over President Martin Van Buren’s predecessor, Andrew Jackson, who chose not to recharter the Second Bank of the United States.

Whig editor James Watson Webb, at the helm of the New York Courier and Enquirer, was much disliked by Cilley, who thought Webb’s Congressional coverage was biased. While speaking on the House floor, Cilley indicated that Webb’s change from opposing to supporting the rechartering of the bank came about because Webb received loans from the bank totaling $50,000.

Stung by Cilley’s remarks, Webb asked Kentucky Congressman William J. Graves to deliver to Cilley a letter from Webb expressing his unhappiness. When Cilley refused to read the letter, Graves felt his own own honor had been insulted and challenged Cilley to a duel. Despite having no personal beef with Graves but rather Webb, Cilley felt honor bound to accept. This would be a deadly mistake.

The duel was set for Saturday, Feb. 24, 1838 at Bladensburg Dueling Grounds, just outside the border of Maryland since dueling was illegal in D.C. An estimated 26 duels were fought there, the most famous being in 1820 between Commodores Stephen Decatur and James Barron in 1820.

Pistols at dawn were usually the order of business in these matters. But because Graves was reputed as being a very good shot, Cilley requested the use of rifles instead of pistols at 80 yards. The time for the duel was 3 p.m., which seemed unusual until I read that Graves couldn’t even find a rifle at first and had to borrow one from his “second”, George Jones.

Cilley and Graves, along with their seconds, arrived at the appointed time. The first time they fired on each other, they missed. The distance was shortened a little before they fired again, missing each other again. That should have been the end of it but during a third exchange, Graves hit Cilley in the femoral artery and he bled to death in a matter of minutes.

The event sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C. The quote at the top of today’s post is from a speech given by Rep. Fairfield the Monday after the duel, one among many given by Cilley’s friends. The duel led to the passage of a congressional act of February 20, 1839, prohibiting the issuing or accepting of a challenge within the District of Columbia, even if the duel was to be fought outside the district.

Cilley was brought home for burial in Elm Grove Cemetery. Sadly, he had not yet seen his youngest daughter, Julia, who was born in Thomaston two months before he died. His wife, Deborah, died only six years later at the age of 36. It was a tragic end to a man whose political career was just reading a high point.

Across the way from the Cilley monument is the O’Brien family plot. You can’t miss it for the large statue of Edward O’Brien on the top. A shipbuilder, O’Brien was one of only seven millionaires listed in America at the time of the Civil War.

The son of an Irishman and an American mother, O’Brien was a focused businessman who kept a close eye on his affairs, from accounting to materials. Engaged in shipbuilding since 1825, he built upwards of 100 vessels. A financial crisis in 1857 could have crippled Thomaston but thanks to O’Brien’s financial help, the local bank remained in good standing.

In the 1850s, O’Brien moved his shipyard business from Warren to the area around Knox’s Wharf in Thomaston, becoming one of the town’s most prominent shipbuilders. According to an article on the Maine Memory Network, his ships were known around the world, distinguished by a broad unpainted “bright line, some six planks just below the deck beading kept unpainted and clear varnished.”

Finally, I’d like to share the story of the Creighton family. James Alexander Creighton was first a ship’s captain, then a shipbuilder and lime kiln owner. In 1874, he married Emily Jackson Meservey of Boston. Together, they would have eight children. Five would live into adulthood and have their own families, but three (James, Lizzie and Arthur) died in infancy/childhood.

These three children have their stones beside each other. The one that hits you right in the heart is the one for James Edwin Creighton.

Photographing little James’ marker hit me hard that day. My own son was nearby, roaming around the cemetery without a care in the world. When I was done, I grabbed him close and gave him a long, painful hug that he didn’t understand.

Emily Creighton was 40 when she gave birth to their last child, Arthur, on Dec. 8, 1870. She would die only 16 days later on Christmas Eve. Arthur died on Feb. 22, 1871.

James Creighton remarried in 1874 to Isabell “Belle” Lewis. He died of heart disease in 1893. Belle died in 1900. He is buried with both of his wives and several of his children in Elm Grove.

After we left Thomaston, we headed up the coast to Camden to find our little seaside cottage at Glenmoor by the Sea. We spent the late afternoon hours hunting for sea glass among the rocks on West Penobscot Bay. This is the kind of family time I treasure.

Join me next time for more cemetery hopping adventures in Maine!