USA > New York > New York City > Walks in our churchyards; old New York, Trinity Parish > Part 7
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I have quoted this memorandum in full, because it substantiates one of the customs of the day which struck European travelers as strange. Coming from England, where it was the custom to keep the bodies of the dead for a week while preparations were going on for an ostentatious burial, it is not strange that the Reverend John Lambert, who visited this country in 1807-8 and put his impres- sions in print afterwards in his " Journal," should call attention to the hasty burials that were then in vogue here. He says: "They bury the dead within twenty-four hours ; a custom probably in- duced by the heat of the climate during the sum- mer months." Then he goes on to speak of a young English gentleman, who dropped dead one evening at the feet of a lady to whom he was paying his addresses, and was kneeling in sport, and who was already buried when he went around
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to his house at four o'clock the next afternoon. Customs vary and change. As far back as I can remember it was not thought decent to hold a funeral sooner than three days after death.
But I must hasten from Trinity churchyard, where my feet have already delayed too long. I go out of the gate with lingering steps, knowing what treasures of antiquity are left behind. Why, yonder is a baby's tombstone and the little one of two summers is called " Miss" on the grave- stone, and close by is the gravestone of Mrs. Ann Brovort, wife of Elias Brovort, Jr., who is de- scribed on the granite as "aged 87 years and up- wards." Here, also, is the queer old tomb of the Mount family, with the curious anagram in stone in one corner-the old tombstone being now cased in a setting of polished granite by the descendants in that famous lineage. I do not wonder at hear- ing voices that seem to call me back. Look at these brown sandstone slabs that lie close to the
northern gateway. It makes one's cheek flush with patriotic pride to read the inscriptions. They tell us that under those stones rest the remains of John Morin Scott, most ardent of "Liberty Boys" and one of the men who by word and deed
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kindled the revolutionary spirit in this city with a flame that never has been extinguished; that next to his are the ashes of Lewis Allain Scott, once Secretary of the Commonwealth, and close by sleeps the dust of the Rev. Charles McKnight, for many years pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Monmouth, New Jersey, and of his son, Richard McKnight, "captain in the American Army of the Revolution." I know, too, where other un- recorded heroes sleep, and it seems to me that I could not take their hands as comrades in the other world if my pen had not done them justice in the world that is yet mine.
I pass out of the old into the new cemetery. At least, it was new, still, when one of my ances- tors rode into New York with Washington, on a certain afternoon in 1783, and St. Paul's Church, which stood in its centre, was yet without a steeple. The first stone of St. Paul's was laid on the 14th of May, 1764, and the church was opened for public worship on the 30th of October, 1766. The site was quite in the outskirts of the city. The same year in which the foundation stone was laid, the lot on which it stands had been ploughed up and sowed with wheat. When the building
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was finished, by the completion of the steeple in 1794, it was considered the most elegant and im- posing church edifice in the city. The church lot extended in a beautiful lawn to the river, which at that time came up as far as Greenwich Street, and seen from the water, which it was intended to front, St. Paul's, surrounded by stately trees and a spacious churchyard, must have been very attrac- tive to the eye. In 1866 the centennial of this chapel was observed with a three-days' festival, and in 1889 it was a most conspicuous object in the centennial of President Washington's in- auguration as the handsome memorial tablet on its interior wall will always bear witness.
There is no other building in New York so his- torically important as old St. Paul's. Here General Washington worshipped when as Com- mander-in-Chief he occupied the city before the disastrous battle of Long Island. Here Lord Howe, the British commander, listened to the preaching of his chaplain, the Rev. Dr. O'Meara, and Sir Guy Carleton, Major Andre, and the English midshipman who was afterwards William the Fourth of England, Lord Cornwallis and other royalist soldiers, were of the congregation. Trinity
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was burned to the ground on the night of the British occupation of New York, but St. Paul's not only escaped the destruction by flames that scorched it, but it was kept open for services without interruption, and patriot and tory preached in its pulpits according as the fortune of war varied. Here the Governor of the State had his pew, and the legislature and common council had seats allotted to them and actually and regularly attended worship. When New York became the capital of the federated common- wealths in 1789, a pew was also set apart for the President of the United States, and until the new Trinity Church was consecrated, President and Mrs. Washington always set a good example by their regular attendance. It should never be for- gotten by American youth that on the day of his inauguration, when he had reached the highest point of human ambition and was the object of the world's wonder and admiration, George Wash- ington turned away from the shouting multitude, the parade and the display, and came to kneel with the humility of a little child at the altar of old St. Paul's, to receive the blessing of the Lord's anointed minister.
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Now that in the course of time's changes the rear of St. Paul's Chapel has virtually become the front of the edifice, the stranger has his attention called to the monument erected against the chan- cel window and the two tall shafts that stand in the graveyard on either side. The central monu-
ment, erected by Congress to the memory of General Montgomery, the hero of the hopeless attack on Quebec in the early part of the Revolu- tion, tells its own story. The shafts commemorate Thomas Addis Emmett, an eminent jurist, brother of the Robert Emmett who has passed into his- tory as the Irish patriot and martyr, and Dr. William James McNeven, a distinguished physician who, as his epitaph says " raised chemistry to a science." It is remarkable that the three famous men whose monuments stand sentinel at the gate of old St. Paul's, were born in Ireland, and once devoted adherents of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Theirs are certainly the three most dis- tinguished names among the myriads of natives of Ireland buried in New York and its vicinity, and the mention of this fact carries a political as well as ecclesiastical moral. Married to ladies connected with leading New York families (Gen-
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eral Montgomery married Miss Janet Livingston, eldest sister of Chancellor Livingston who admin- istered the oath of office to President Washington,) their descendants wield a wide influence in church and state, and deservedly so. These ancestral monuments are their inspiration.
There are Celtic inscriptions on both the Emmett and McNeven shafts, that is to say, a transcript of the English epitaphs in the old Irish tongue. On the west side of the Emmett shaft the latitude and longitude are thus recorded : " 40° 42' 40" N., 74° 03' 21" 5 W. L. G." The "G " presumably stands for Greenwich, the point from which the reckoning is made.
In this same old churchyard a fourth native of Ireland is interred, who, if he has no memorial shaft to perpetuate his name and deeds, did more for the practical benefit of his fellowman and more for the future prosperity of New York, than any other who sleeps in the enclosure. This was Christopher Collis, to whom the city of New York was indebted for her first water-works and the State of New York for the Erie Canal. It was this busy inventor and tireless thinker who first conceived the idea of uniting the waters of the
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great lakes to the Hudson, who lectured on the subject here and addressed successive legislatures, and who inspired De Witt Clinton to put his shoulder to the wheel and push the project to its accomplishment. Collis was an originator always. He had a steam engine at work pumping water from the Collect Pond into his reservoir on Broad- way near Pearl Street, at the rate of 417,600 gal- lons daily, ten years before Fulton had begun to make any practical application of steam to travel, and he had already mooted the notion that the same force might be applied to ferry boats, in the place of horse-power, with safety and economy. His lectures on pneumatics and the steam engine were an unfailing matter of interest and entertain- ment to the New Yorkers of the last century, and though they did not benefit himself to any great extent, they paved the way for others who reduced theory to practice and thus permanently benefited the community. The latest achievement of this pioneer inventor was the rigging of a semaphoric telegraph between New York and Sandy Hook, which furnished employment for the closing years of his life. Christopher Collis died on the first day of October, 1816, in the seventy-ninth year
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of his age and is buried in St. Paul's churchyard. His tombstone is an humble ode, for he passed away in poverty, and yet no man possessed more friends when living or did more for the land and city in which he lived. He was fully worthy to be one of the famous quartette whose records shed lustre on the churchyard.
As I pass out from under the shadow of the tall shafts and the presence of the great dead, I think of the tiny scraps of dust in the old churchyard, to which the golden lock of hair
belongs. I wonder if the little child has grown any older among her Father's mansions. Her mother joined her before many years had passed and I wonder if she knew her child in glory. What a wise little one she must be, that baby aunt of mine. Long ago her tiny feet could find their way through every street in the city which is above and knew the names on the door of every heavenly mansion. Long ago she learned to speak in the tongue of the angel host and the secrets which the wise of this world wrestle over and never penetrate were this child's alphabet. Strange mystery of the future, to which this lock of sunny hair is the key, and
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yet I cannot penetrate it. Some day a little child will lead me perhaps on the voyage of its discovery, and I grey-haired and once deemed wise will acknowledge my ignorance to the babe. And so, as we walk, the smallest of graves becomes the grandest of teachers.
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TRINITY MISSION HOUSE.
XI.
I HELD in my hand the other day a Book of the Dead. In appearance it was an unimpressive volume in brown leather, whose records were written in various hands and sometimes with ink that had grown faded and blurred, yet the names in its register had a strange fascination for me. They had once stood for living men and women and tender little children, who had lived out their span, had struggled, hoped, loved and died. Then after they had been laid gently in the bosom of mother earth, a stranger had written without a pang the record of the name to which they answered no more, of the years they had lived and the place of their burial. It had all happened long ago, and the hands that had written the brief histories had become dust and ashes too. Spring after spring had come and gone, bringing flowers and green grasses and the singing birds; the mounds over the dead had become leveled with the surrounding earth, the tombstones had crumbled and the mosses had eaten away their inscriptions, and living eyes looked through the old books of
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names and sadly wondered. Yet not without hope. Ah, not without knowledge that one day these dry bones should live, and clad in the glory of immortal youth stand smiling and serene on the ramparts of the city whose builder and maker they have already seen face to face. This was the message that was whispered to me by the yellow pages and the faded ink.
There are no records of burials in the parish prior to 1777. The great fire which swept away the larger part of the lower city on the night in which the British troops occupied New York, burned up Trinity Church and the school house in which the books were kept under charge of the clerk of the parish. The church was not rebuilt until 1790, but the churchyard was in use through- out the time of the British occupation. There most of the private soldiers, sailors, prisoners of war, strangers and the poor were interred, it being regarded as a public burial place. The British officers who died during the time, officials and citizens of wealth and standing were buried in the grounds around St. Paul's, the church itself being set apart as the military chapel of the English commander. Many of the tombstones antedate
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the war of the Revolution. Near the west en- trance is a stone to the memory of James Davis, "late Smith in the Royal Artillery, who died in December, 1769, aged 30 years," and near it is a still older and less legible slab which commem- orates John Jones, and perpetuates this poetry that evidently came from his wife's hand :
O most cruel sudden Death Thus did take her husband's breath, But the Lord he thought it best.
Scattered around this part of the cemetery are memorials of the Somerindykes, Ogdens, Nesbitts, Rhinelanders, Thornes, Cornells, Van Amridges, the Gunning, Bogert, Onderdonk, Tredwell, Cut- ler and Waldo families. This acre of the dead had gathered in many occupants during its first peaceful decade.
In the book of burials of which I have spoken, the first recorded entry is that of Mrs. Wittenhall, of whom no other particulars are given than her name and the fact that she was interred at St. Paul's. The sexton kept the record, as is duly narrated when it came his turn to be entered among the dead. In the six years that follow the
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entries make a strange collection, and one can read in them, better than in any history of the time, the desolation of the city while it was in the hands of the oppressor. War and the selfishness that grows out of the fact that human life is then held at a cheap rate, can be seen pictured on every page. Here are the ravages of fever and small- pox, there the deaths from wounds and again when food is scarce and firing dear, the deaths among the wives and children of the soldiers in garrison run up to a fearful figure. During the month of May in that year are recorded the burial of Mr. Nash's child, who died of small-pox, of a sergeant who perished of his wounds, of an artil- leryman, of a soldier's wife, of a Light Horse- man, and several strangers, but no names are given except in the case of a child of an inhabi- tant. Occasionally the record is varied with burials at St. George's, in Beekman Street, and the French church in Pine Street, and on Septem- ber 17th, Mrs. Stuyvesant, aged 85, is recorded as buried at the Bowery, in the graveyard which now surrounds St. Mark's Church.
Of the British officers who lie under the turf of old St. Paul's, I find the names of Col. Mungo
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Campbell, who died of his wounds, and was buried October 7; Captain Wolfe, who perished of fever in the next July, of Captains Gibbs, Walker, Bond, Talbot, Logan, Norman and Horton, of Lieut. Iredell and Lieut. Inslee, who died of wounds (" at Tom's River, New Jersey," adds the record- ing hand of the sexton), of Captain Wilcox, killed in battle, of a Hessian Major and a dozen Hessian officers, all unknown, who were interred with military honors Mr. Wies, Commissary-General of the English Army, died of the fever and a tombstone was raised to his memory. The Rev. Mr. Barton and the Rev. Mr. Winslow were also numbered with the dead and buried here. Hap- pily such as these received mention, but when pestilence settled down on the city and added its horrors to those of war, the entries in the book of burials read " a refugee woman," "two sailors in one grave," "a doctor, aged thirty-two," "a strange woman," " a free mason." The last burials entered before the British flag was hauled down at the Battery were those of "a sailor lad, 15 years old," "a soldier's wife, 46," " a soldier's child, 8," and the first after the American flag was unfurled over the city, " a child of Mr. Stringham."
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To me there is something extremely pathetic in these records. What a strange gathering of friend and foe, of aristocrat and outcast, of youth and age it would be if these graves could suddenly and simultaneously give up their occupants. The tombstones give no indications of their numbers. For every slab and monument that stands in the enclosure there are a score of sleepers whose dust is undistinguishable from the ground in which it rests. From the month of December in the year 1800, the records are made in the clear, clerkly hand of Bishop Benjamin Moore. I turned a few pages and came to an announcement that in its time had convulsed the whole land. Yet now it is simply a name and date and a careless observer would easily pass it by. It is under the date of the year 1804 and reads, "July 12, Alexander Hamilton, 45, Trinity churchyard." That is all that tells of the death of America's greatest states- man. Just below is another record, "July 12, Mr Harsen's child, St. Paul's churchyard." The little one without a name was laid away in its grave on the same day that a multitude wept at the opened tomb of Hamilton. Yet I doubt not that there were hearts that ached as they turned
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away from the mound that covered the babe. My memory goes back to the time when old St. Paul's held as large and as fashionable a con- gregation as any in the city. Lower Broadway, the streets around the City Hall Park, Greenwich, Fulton and Vesey Streets, held a large population and Park Place was a centre of aristocracy. The Rev. Dr. Parks, a graduate of West Point, was then in charge, with Dr. Haight as his colleague. At the doors, on Sunday, were grouped as many carriages as at Trinity and there was a sort of social rivalry between the congregations. The list of the pewholders then was something like a mod- ern book of the peerage, but while many names suggest themselves to memory there are others that have been forgotten and there is nothing to keep track of the changes.
In the list which at any rate would be too long to give in its entirety, are found the names of Ferdinand Suydam, Peter Goelet, one of the most famous of old New York merchants, whose pros- perity kept apace with the growth of the city he loved, Bache McEvers, John H. Talman, whose daughter, Miss Caroline Talman, built and en- dowed the church of the Beloved Disciple, while
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still an attendant at Trinity Chapel, and John Q. Jones, President of the Chemical Bank. Henry Cotheal was a vestryman, and he and his son, Alexander I. Cotheal occupied two pews at the side of the pulpit. The son, Alexander I. Cotheal, was in early life a teacher in the Sunday School. He is still living, in his eighty-seventh year, and has seen nearly all the modern growth of this great city. Formerly a merchant, he has devoted his later years to study. Another group of St. Paul's people were Anthony Barclay, George Barclay, Templeton Strong, Benjamin Armitage and David B. Ogden. Mr. Armitage was at one time a teacher in the Sunday School and Benjamin M. Brown was Superintendent. Mr. Thomas Gale has still a living representative at St. Paul's in the person of his niece, Miss Sarah Thorne, who is still an active worker in the church. Of John David Wolfe, all mercantile New York knows and of what he did for the city and its masses. Another pewholder of the olden time was George Jones, whose daughter became the wife of Wm. Alexander Smith. The old Jones mansion at 82d Street and Avenue B, beautifully situated on a bluff at the East River, was torn down last year,
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but enough of the old family possessions on the line of the river still remains to preserve the tradi- tions of Jones' Wood and keep the name in the mouth of the public. The list might be indefi- nitely extended, and include the names of Good -. win, Pray, Spencer, Lee, Gerry, of Revolutionary renown, McVickar, Winthrop, Rhinelander, Har- rison, Edgar and others whose homes were located below St. Paul's Chapel at the time that the Episcopal residence of that giant of the faith, Bishop Hobart, was on Vesey Street, opposite St. Paul's churchyard.
Those were glorious days of the church when Bishop Hobart, attended by his two favorite as- sistant ministers, Drs. Onderdonk and Berrian, pervaded New York like another St. Paul. He was everywhere at once, fervent, sympathetic, aggressive, and to him more than any other man was due the awakening which sent the church forward into the proper place of leadership. I meant to have stood beneath his monument and spoken of him in that sacred spot, but the place does not matter, for the presence of this great pioneer prelate is felt at every place where his feet passed by. I read some weeks ago the jour-
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nal of a Unitarian minister who came from Boston in 1820 to hear Edward Everett, then a minister, preach the sermon at the opening of their church on Chambers Street, and who fell in some way under the influence of the bishop. This stranger in our gates wrote: "The power of earnestly and successfully appealing to the consciences of men was possessed by Hobart in an eminent degree. In his ministrations the ardor of Peter was aptly blended with the boldness of Paul, and honesty of purpose breathed through and consecrated all his professional efforts. The Episcopal Church has rarely possessed an ally of greater power."
It is a matter of rejoicing to the grey-haired men and women who recall the glories of old St. Paul's as it was fifty years ago, when its walls and spire had not been dwarfed by the great structures that how hem it in and its aisles were thronged by people born within hearing of its bell, to learn that its veins are still full of active life. It has become the spiritual home of more than four hundred families, the Sunday School numbers five hundred scholars and the communicants are six hundred and forty-nine. Not a bad showing that for a down-town church, and as I write the figures
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I can well understand the enthusiasm of a young man whom I met in the church one Sunday even- ing, and who told me that he was brakeman on a New Jersey railroad but always attended old St. Paul's. The attendance is drawn largely from the laboring class, but they are worthy successors to the men and women who preceded them and have grandly demonstrated that there is now no danger of a possible failure in the congregation. They have the zeal and the fire of Paul and are endowed with his missionary spirit. In all the city there is no place to which the lukewarm can go with greater certainty of having their old flames re- kindled.
As it was in the beginning, when " the third English church in the fields " was opened, so may it be to the end !
XII.
IT will be fifty years ago, in August, since I entered the Sunday School of St John's Chapel as a scholar. At first, being an urchin of tender years I was placed in a class with my two sisters, in the girls' school, with Mrs. Lindley Murray Hoffman as teacher. But I soon overgrew this gentle com- panionship and was transferred to the boys' de- partment in the basement of the same building and placed under the care of the late Rev. Dr. Sullivan H. Weston, who was then a student of theology. The chancel of the church has now usurped the place of the former Sunday School building, which was a stone structure three stories in height, whose upper and lower floors were de- voted to the boys and girls respectively and were furnished with square, white wooden forms for the convenience of the classes. The main floor was fitted up after the fashion of a chapel, with organ and reading desk, and here we all assembled on Sunday morning at ten o'clock, to be catechised by the Rev. Dr. Wainwright, whose dignified pres- ence, set off by a black silk gown and bands, kept the most of the restless boys in order.
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Across the golden mists of departed years, now half a century in number, I see the throngs of curly heads and rosy cheeks, and my eyes are young again as I look into their faces. To me they are ever fair and young; to the world, they are dust and ashes. As memory calls the roll, I can summon up but half a dozen in life, and they are grey-haired and their cheeks have lost the radi- ant rosiness of their childhood. It seems impos- sible that so many seasons have rolled between that day and this. I can recall the new clothes and tight shoes of those Sundays and my uneasi- ness in their clasp; the broad leghorn hats with pink and blue streamers that half hid the faces of my sisters and their companions on the other side of the aisle; the sycamores on the outside, in whose branches the orioles built their nests year after year; the flowers in the adjacent Berrian and Blenkard gardens and the vine that clambered over the back porch of my own home, two doors away. The peace and sweetness of those unfor- gotten Sundays come back to me, now, like the breath of home to an exile.
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