My 13 Favorite Gravestones and Memorials

After researching local history and genealogy for 50 years, I have traipsed through a fair number of cemeteries. (See "I See Dead Entrepreneurs" about Mount Auburn, and "I See Dead Entrepreneurs: Dr. Augustin Thompson and Moxie.")

As I was death cleaning some of my 1,404 image folders the other day, I decided I had enough odds and ends to assemble a Top 13 Favorite Gravestones list.  

#13 The first chapter of Innovation on Tap featured Eli Whitney, whose beautiful tombstone sits in Yale’s Grove Street Cemetery.

Most people know Whitney for this cotton gin and his firearms factory, but I covered his most remarkable achievement in a 2013 post, “Not for the Squeamish: Eli Whitney’s Greatest Innovation.”

What makes the Grove Street Cemetery fascinating is the number of American innovators buried so closely to Whitney.

Sell Out and Become a Regular Man

I am reposting this May 2012 article about "The Ice King" after visiting with cousins last weekend and being treated to a bird's-eye view of Spy Pond in Arlington, one of Frederic Tudor's "ice factories." (Pictures below.) Tudor was booted from "Innovation on Tap" for length--my bad for writing 600 pages when no publisher wanted to see more than 280--but, author's foibles aside, he remains one of the most fascinating innovators of his time.

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Frederic Tudor was born in Boston on the day the peace treaty ending the American Revolution was signed in 1783. He rode the earliest wave of American entrepreneurial activity, becoming one of the country’s first millionaires.  

Tudor possessed all of the qualities we have come to treasure (for better or worse) in our entrepreneurs, being described as “defiant. . .sometimes reckless in spirit. . .imperious, vain, contemptuous of competitors, and implacable to enemies.  While energetic in competition, he preferred legalized monopoly.”

What really made Tudor successful, however, was his incredible, ungodly persistence. 

At a time when Americans joked that New England had just two crops, ice, and granite, Frederic Turner took the former and turned it into a multimillion-dollar industry, creating a precious luxury item in markets from New Orleans to Havana to Calcutta.  He saw a market that was simply invisible to his fellow merchants, and he built that market by teaching people how to carry, store, and use ice to preserve foods, cool drinks, and make ice cream.  

We know Tudor was an entrepreneur because his fellow Boston merchants--who were happy to speculate in everything from coffee to mahogany to umbrellas--thought he was just plain nuts.  When he invested $10,000 in 1806 and filled the good ship Favorite with huge blocks of ice hacked from Fresh Pond in Cambridge, the Boston Gazette wrote, “No joke.  A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique.  We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.” 

Much to the delight of his skeptics, this first trip turned out to be a financial disaster.  While much of the ice miraculously made it to Martinique, Tudor lacked infrastructure (namely, an ice house) and consumer education (how to use something that had never before been seen), so the ice melted away in six weeks, and he lost $4000.  (The solution to insulation would prove to be sawdust, creating an important aftermarket for New England sawmills.)

Spy Pond, Arlington, 1852

Spy Pond, Arlington, May 2024 (from the bee-keeping meadow :)

Tweets for Tweets (7): My Favorite Bird Photos July 2022- Early October 2023

It's been a busy 12 months as we head into the 2023 holiday season, and this blog suffered the consequences. Not that I've been lazy, mind you. Just a little distracted.

I've worked on several white paper topics for Carrier, including a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the centrifugal chiller. Carrier is 120 years old and reinventing itself, which is a fascinating process to watch (and cheer on).

I've also been writing for the Old Colony Historical Society blog. Articles include: 

• "The Horses Behaved Better Than the People: Taunton's Fourth of July" 
• "We Talk With an AI Historian About the Old Colony" (in which I experimented with ChatGPT)
• Three posts here, here, and here about calamities (hurricanes, fires, blizzards) that have visited the Old Colony in the last three centuries
• A post about my great-uncle, "Charles Monroe Baker: Taunton's Architect of Big Buildings" 
• An article featuring Dighton, Anawan, and Plymouth Rocks called "Loves Me Like a Rock: 8 Old Colony Hunks You Should Know" 

  

  One of Uncle Charlie Baker's most impressive buildings,
  the First Parish Church in Framingham, MA

• A summer 2022 reading list, "The Authors of the Old Colony: A Summer Reading List (If You Dare)"
• And, a bit on "The Golden Age of Radio in the Old Colony," where I got to mention another uncle, Eddie Litchfield. 

I also got to be an early reader of Bill Hanna and Katie MacDonald's nearly-published book, a fascinating history of the Taunton River. It's a work of art, and I have yet to see all the archival pictures in the completed book.

Both King Philip's War and Innovation on Tap book talks and speaking engagements have picked up, and that's been fun. 

I've also been writing bunches of essays for our Family Tree Maker database, and one in particular to my family that summarizes fifty years of genealogical research. 

I started essays on the Boxford match factory and researched ideas for three possible books, none of which panned out--but it was good work.

Oh--- I almost forgot. :) We were blessed with our first grandson, Theodore Schultz Lindquist. I have re-learned my Raffi lyrics, how to change a diaper, and where the best swings are located. It's. been. the. greatest. thing. since. the 1990s. I haven't taken Theo to Anawan Rock yet, or told him about Willis Carrier's "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" or the mistake Eli Whitney made in his cotton gin business plan, but soon. However, I did build few books for him on Shutterfly, including one to prepare him for birding.

My pig continues to behave. I even met a gentleman on my last Mass Audubon trip who had a porcine valve inserted in 2008 (thirteen years before me), and he thinks he's got another five years before the pig konks out. I was hoping for a decade of steady oinks, so that news was very, very encouraging.

Our couples book club passed 22 years and 162 books, with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead becoming one of my all-time favorites.

As for birding, I've hit the usual local hotspots, running my life list up to 725 species. I also 

• Traveled to Block Island with Mass Audubon earlier this month, adding a Buff-breastedSandpiper and a Clay-colored Sparrow
• Birded a little on Star Island (Isle of Shoals) as part of a King Philip's War book talk, getting to spend time with one of my favorite archaeologists and historians, Dr. Emerson Baker

• 

  Bay View, August 2023, one of the
  best handbell concerts all year

  Visited Rocky Mountain National Park last summer (while babysitting for a Taylor Swift concert) and was lucky to add a Violet-green Swallow, Mountain Chickadee, Pygmy Nuthatch, Mountain Bluebird, Western Tanager, Spotted Towhee, Black-chinned Hummingbird, and a Broad-tailed Hummingbird. That collection is big-time stuff for an Easterner!
• Birded around Bay View in Petoskey, Michigan (though I am habitually three weeks late visiting Hartwick Pines to see a Kirtland Warbler), while my lovely and talented wife played handbells
• And birded the Finger Lakes (including Montezuma, where we spotted a Trumpeter Swan) with a visit to Cornell's birding center last November.

Here are some of my favorite bird photos taken during that period. First, from the aforementioned Finger Lakes:

After This, Nothing Will Be the Same (Dick Fosbury RIP)

I first posted this piece on March 15, 2020. We lost Dick Fosbury recently, so I am reposting in his honor. There are very few "singularities" in sports, a moment when there is a clear before and after. Babe Ruth's home runs. Seth Curry's 3-point shooting. Dick Fosbury's Flop. RIP.

Remember Dick Fosbury? In 1967 he was ranked the 61^st best high-jumper in the world. At the Olympics in Mexico City the following year, he cleared the bar at 7 feet 4.25 inches and won the gold medal.

He did it with a style so different from the traditional "western straddle" that it came to be called the Fosbury Flop. People laughed. Coaches watched in disbelief. One newspaper described it as going over the bar "like a guy being pushed out of a 30-story window."

Today, you cannot find a world-class high jumper who doesn't do the Fosbury Flop. One moment it was one thing; the next, it would never be the same.

New Local History Posts for Old Colony Historical Museum

For local history fans, I have six articles posted on Old Colony's "Medium" site, which (I think and hope) can be easily accessed. 

The first, posted in July 2022, is The Golden Age of Radio in the Old Colony (Three Acts). Not only is it a fun re-telling of the roots of commercial radio in the United States, but it's also a shout-out to my Uncle Eddie Litchfield, who was the voice of WPEP for 40 years. 

The second article, posted in August 2022, is The Authors of the Old Colony: A Summer Reading List (If You Dare). I don't usually traffic in listicles so thought I'd try my hand. The line-up includes a little history, a little poetry, some biography, and even true crime. (What says summer reading like Lizzie Borden and forty whacks?)

The third post, from October 2022, is Loves Me Like a Rock: Eight Old Colony Hunks You Should Know. Counting backward, #3 is Anawan Rock and #2 Dighton Rock. I'll let you guess #1.

Uncle Charlie's First Parish Church (1926)
in Framingham, MA

In December 2022, Old Colony posted Charles Monroe Baker: Taunton's Architect of Large Buildings. My great Uncle Charlie died before I was born, but he left a legacy of beautiful buildings all over eastern Massachusetts. My grandmother told me once that "Uncle Charlie was not a true Baker, as he always tried to preserve the amenities." I'll leave the implications of that comment to your imagination.

My two most recent posts are the first two parts of a three-part series called Fire and Ice: Some Calamities of the Old Colony. Part one is all about famous fires, including Brockton's Strand Theatre Fire and the Myles Standish State Forest Fire in 1964. Part two focuses on famous snowstorms, including the Blizzard of '78.

As you browse other Old Colony posts on Medium, you'll find all kinds of interesting history articles from Katie MacDonald (on how museums can be redefined in the 21st century) and Dr. William Hanna, including one on local Nike Missle sites, the death of Elizabeth McKinstry (at the future St. Thomas rectory), and the Reverend Samuel Hopkins Emery, who was born in Boxford but made his name in Taunton.