6 Smallpox Victims, 1 Stone
JAFFREY - On a wooded hilltop several hundred feet west of Route 202 north, four stone walls stand watch over a grief two centuries old.
For many, years, the victims of a 1792 smallpox epidemic were all but forgotten, as was the cemetery where they were buried. Every trace of memorial has long since vanished, the 1937 History of Jaffrey notes. No Potters field of dead waifs and strays was ever more neglected than this graveyard where many new-made. towns, if they could count it as a possession, would erect a monument and make it an honored shrine. No path leads to this forsaken enclosure. No one comes here, now except that occasionally a mild-eyed cow, standing by the stone wall, chews her ruminative cud and wonders vaguely if it be worth the while, to climb over the obstruction to crop the sparse herbage within.
In 1996, as in 1937, no path leads to the smallpox cemetery. But in the years since the town history was publishedsome 11 years ago, in factthe town did, indeed, erect a monument to memorialize the six smallpox victims who are buried there. The renovation of the cemetery was spearheaded by Edward Deschenes, who was a selectman at the time and who owns the land where the cemetery sits.
Few, now, can understand the terror that seized upon communities in 1792, when the smallpox scourge attacked them, the history reports. Because the. disease spread so quickly, Jaffrey, like other towns, took measures to counter itthough the measures were controversial.
Dr. Adonijah. Howe, a Jaffrey resident and, a progressive physician of skill and the highest character, according to the town history, asked permission to establish a pest-house where people could be immunized against the disease by being inoculated with a mild case of it, from which they had a reasonable chance of recovery. Many in town opposed the idea, and a petition against the pest-house circulated. Nonetheless, Howe set up the house in the former Simeon Burt house, which stood between the smallpox cemetery and what is now Route 202.
People from many area towns traveled there in an attempt to protect themselves from the plague. No record has been found of the number who took the treatment or the cures made, but that they came from a wide surrounding country and that six cases resulted in death is learned from the mortality record of the Reverend Laban Ainsworth, the history states.
The first to die was Eliza Danforth of Amherst, who left this world Oct. 25, 1792. One week later, the Honorable Abel Wilder of Winchendon, Mass, also met his end.
Wilder, a prominent citizen, had been selected delegate to the National Convention in Baltimore. Before making the long journey to the convention, he thought it wise to inoculate himself against smallpox, so he set out for Jaffrey. Unfortunately, in Wilders case, the cure proved deadly. Instead of meeting with his peers in the great National Convention, he prepared calmly for his final journey to the corner of the cow pasture, relates the town history.
On Nov. 4, another grave was dug at the smallpox- cemetery, that of Nancy Thorndike, the 12-year-old, daughter of a prominent Jaffrey store-keeper. A 23-year-old Keene man, Enoch Thurber, died Nov. 12. A Rindge resident identified only as Mr. Cambridge, succumbed to smallpox Dec. 14, and the final victim, Oliver Gould of Jaffrey, died, Dec. 19.
Gould, relates the town history, was in the prime of life and had growing children. He could not well be spared, but lies here, one of an outcast band, in the forsaken corner of the cow pasture, a soldier of the Revolution over whose grave Taps has never been sounded or the Reveille heard.
Such are the residents of the once forgotten cemetery, a most incongruous company as the history states, but enough of tragedy is buried in this little forsaken plot to outweigh the grief for a hundred in the ordered communities of the dead. Here no prayers were offered, no family and no friends gathered about, no earth to earth, no dust to dust was said here. Rather the, burial was at night, as if it were the work of ghouls and not, of men.
Source: Monadnock Ledger, 7 November 1996. By Jane Eklund.