
![]() Quahog.org > Attractions > William Blackstone Memorial Park William Blackstone Memorial Parkby Louise Lind Has anyone seen a box of bones around? Corner of Blackstone and Broad Streets, Cumberland The following article originally appeared in Old Rhode Island magazine, October 1992. It is reprinted here with permission of the author. Mysteries, mysteries, mysteries! Why did the Reverand William Blackstone (1595-1675), the first Englishman to settle in Rhode Island, come to North America? What were his thoughts and opinions as he observed the first fifty years of American history from his hilltop home on the Blackstone River? And where, by the way, are his bones today?
Although considerable enthusiasm was manifested, nothing in the way of a monument was constructed. One wonders who kept the dimes.
One of the directors of the Lonsdale Company, William Gammell, happened also to be president of the Rhode Island Historical Society. His influence may be responsible for the care with which the Lonsdale Company's agents sought Blackstone's remains and removed them to a safer place while the gigantic textile mill was being built. Minutes of a special meeting held July 26, 1886, tell us: The Agents reported that on the sixth day of May the grave of William Blackstone was opened by Mssrs. Miles & Luther, well-known Undertakers from Providence, and that the human remains found therein consisted of a few small pieces of bone and a quantity of pulverized bone resembling lime dust, and that with these were also found a number of nails of ancient make such as might have been used in a coffin long ago. All these were carefully gathered and are now kept in charge of the Superintendent for burial at a future time.
For a slightly different account of the re-interment of William Blackstone's bones and the erection of his monument, we turn again to John Daggett, and to his daughter, Amelia Daggett Sheffield, who edited her father's notes and brought them up to date (A Sketch of the History of Attleborough from Its Settlement to the Division, published in Boston in 1894). "These [the bones] were placed in an appropriate box and again buried under the building, in which there will be a monument to his name..." So the grave was under the mill and the monument was to be in it? Marcia Green, writing in the March 5, 1985, issue of The Evening Times of Pawtucket, says the bones and nails were entrusted to Lonsdale Company Superintendent G.W. Pratt to keep until the mill could be completed and a monument constructed. Mrs. Sheffield, who was probably working on her father's book even while the Ann and Hope Mill was being built, describes the monument thus: The monument stands a very few yards from the grave and in line with it. The precise spot (of the original grave) is covered by Lonsdale Co's Ann and Hope Mill. The monument was erected by some of the descendants of William Blackstone, and the inscription was written by a member of the Lonsdale Co.
For many years, the bones of William Blackstone and a few rusty nails lay beneath this monument, in the box in which Superintendent Pratt had placed them... a wooden box fastened by bands of metal. Commenting on the placement of Blackstone's monument in such an industrial environment, John Wilford Blackstone, author of a booklet about his ancestor in 1907, said:
In the period of textile prosperity, the front of the mill (that facing the Blackstone River) and part of the northern and southern portions were encased by a high iron fence—about seven feet tall. Between the fence and the mill building—a distance of about 100 feet—there was a lawn with a walk. The Blackstone monument was located a short distance west of the mill building near where the two-story and four-story (sections) adjoined… One had to get permission at the mill office to get close enough to the monument to read its inscriptions. The remains of William Blackstone reposed in this lawn-covered plot from 1889 until the early 1940s, undisturbed except by noise. At that time, many New England textile leaders, lured by the promise of cheaper help, moved their operations to the South. Like so many other factory buildings, the Ann and Hope Mill became an empty shell. The grass grew wild around the Blackstone monument. Then came World War II. The United States Navy transformed the Ann and Hope building into a repair depot for the accoutrements of war. A spur track from the railroad ran to the building. The monument stood ignored but in constant danger of being damaged amid the turmoil. The First Presbyterian Church, then located at the corner of Broad and Cumberland Streets, overlooked the rear of the Ann and Hope complex. As a member of that church, Mehard suggested that Blackstone's monument be moved to a small plot of church property on the west side of Broad Street. In his previously quoted letter to David Balfour, he wrote: After some very agreeable negotiations between the then owner of the property and the Navy Department, the monument was moved to its present location in 1944.
The late Robert E. Furey, of El Cerrito, California, remembered seeing the box containing William Blackstone's remains. His father, the late James Furey, was the Ann and Hope building's plant engineer from 1943, when the Navy was using it, through the period when it was owned by the realty company that preceded the Ann and Hope Discount Store. The elder Furey died in January 1965 and his son passed away in August of 1992. The younger Furey used to work for his father during school vacations. In a telephone conversation with this writer March 14, 1990, be brought the story of William Blackstone's wandering bones up to the 1960s. It seems to me the box of William Blackstone's bones was dug up after World War II. The realty company bought the building from the Navy and was renting it out to several different kinds of businesses. It was constructing a separate cottage to be used as an office for the Alamadon Company, a weaving business owned by a mother and her two sons. They found it too noisy to have an office in their weave shed.
Unrecognized, was it thrown out when the building was being transformed into a department store? Where did the remains of Rhode Island's first European settler finally end up? Has anyone seen a ghost, attired in a seventeenth-century clerical coat, hovering about one of the state's landfills? InformationCost: free Time required: allow five minutes. Hours: open year round, dawn to dusk Finding it: From Route 295 take exit 11 to Route 114 south (Diamond Hill Road); turn right on Blackstone Street; William Blackstone Memorial Park will be on your left, at the corner of Blackstone and Broad Streets. What’s nearbyDistances between points are actual distances, without regard to creeks or glandular spiders. Your travel distance will be longer. This article last edited July 15, 2015 © 1999–2021 Quahog.org (with the exception of elements provided by contributors, as noted). |
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