Colonial-era tragedy unearthed during grave cleaning demonstration

KENT — A cluster of headstones in Kent’s oldest cemetery links the town’s first doctor, a Mayflower pilgrim, a family mystery and a centuries-old tragedy. There, the unexpected discovery of two young daughters of a Revolutionary War surgeon, marked by a sorrowful epitaph, helped a Maryland family complete its ancestral story.

Attendees of an Oct. 10 grave cleaning demonstration at Good Hill Cemetery led by Kent Historical Society Curator Marge Smith were treated to a bit of intrigue halfway through working on a stone presumed to belong to Dr. Oliver Fuller, Kent’s first practicing doctor and a veteran of the Revolutionary War.

As the engravings on the soft brownstone became clearer, the group realized the double headstone did not commemorate the doctor and his wife as they had expected, but two much younger souls: Lois and Rhoda Ann Fuller, who died two days apart in June of 1793. Lois was 12 and Rhoda Ann was 11 at the time of their deaths.

Kent cemetery Sexton Brent Kallstrom, who also heads the local American Legion post, said the group was struck by the grave’s elegance and detail, including a moving elegy written at the bottom of the stone, of which only pieces could be made out due to weathering by time and weed whackers.

A grave belonging to Alice Fuller, the doctor’s first wife and father of his three sons who died in 1776, was found nearby, similarly ornate. Also nearby was Fuller’s own headstone, which was comparatively plain to the others, bearing an 1817 date of death. Fuller’s second wife, Lois and Rhoda Ann’s mother, was nowhere to be found at the cemetery, nor was the girls’ older sister Alice.

“It just really brings a tear to your eye,” Kallstrom said of the inscription on the stone, of which a draft interpretation can be found at the end of this article.

While the cause of death for the girls is unknown, smallpox was rampant at the time and could be to blame.

Kallstrom explained that finding the headstone of the two girls was the result of a slew of coincidences: Smith’s demonstration needed a stone, and because the Cemetery Committee, Historical Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution are jointly preparing an identification project for all of Kent’s Revolutionary War veteran graves in anticipation of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it was decided that a yet-uncleaned revolutionary war serviceman’s grave would be used for the event.

As it happened, Kallstrom had recently received a message from Franki Coughlin, a resident of Huntingtown, Maryland, and member of the John Hanson chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, inquiring about the grave of her ancestor: Dr. Oliver Fuller, who is a direct descendant, as is she, of English-born Edward Fuller who came to the new world on the Mayflower. Kallstrom figured it would be the perfect demonstration grave for the cleaning seminar.

Coughlin wrote a genealogical record in 2020, complete with biographies, that was distributed among her family as a pandemic passion project. As a result, she is thoroughly researched on her lineage, which includes many notable figures in the Berkshires, such as the Ramsdell family for whom the public library in the Housatonic region of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is named.

While Coughlin had most of this regional branch of the family pinned down in a cemetery in Housatonic, she said the fate of Fuller’s daughters eluded her own searches, as well as the extensive investigation conducted by her mother and her mother’s cousins.

“They’re all buried in that one cemetery there,” she said. “So we know where they all are, but we never could find the girls. Now we know where the girls are.”

Among her mother’s generation of family researchers, only one cousin, Molly, is still alive. Coughlin is set to visit her in a few weeks to celebrate her 96th birthday and share the news. “She’s just going to be thrilled to death because she — along with my mother and then Lorraine, the other cousin — they were the ones who started this.”

Even without a familial connection, others were similarly excited by the discovery. Kent Historical Society President Deborah Chabrian has labored for hours over the half-worn epitaph on the daughters’ grave since the Oct. 10 grave cleaning, visiting the site at different times of day to photograph the etchings under various light angles and manipulating the images in Photoshop to reveal difficult words and letters.

She said that while the mystery is driving her to try to decipher the text in full, it’s the stone’s, and its writing’s, ability to convey emotions across centuries that drew her in the first place.

“The fact that it’s partially obscured is what makes it more interesting in a way,” Chabrian said. “But one thing rings very clear: It’s very heartfelt, very poetic. Obviously, these little girls were very loved.”

She added that the grave keeps the story of the girls alive: “They lived a short life, but here we are talking about them right now.”

Below is a draft of what Chabrian, with help from Marge Smith, has been able to pull from the stone thus far. She qualified that it is a work in progress, and certain words may not be entirely correct. “We may never know all the words,” she cautioned, “but what we do know tells us how much they were loved and loved each other!”

Two Sisters _____ In ____ne death (or dear?)

One their Ambition hearts & care

And Thus Together Joined

When Death had Called one tender flower

The other Withered in an hour

_____ without to stay Behind

_____________Who lay_______

And _____________True Heart_ Join

_______________________________

Together _____________________

_________A__ben______________...