Paul Marino Gives Tour of Treasures of Hillside Cemetery
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Many of the people who helped shape North Adams, as both a town and a city, are buried at Hillside Cemetery.
Near 90-degree heat and high humidity did not deter local historian Paul W. Marino and seven attendees from launching into a three-hour afternoon cemetery walk Saturday, June 16.
Marino, who will be offering a tour of Southview Cemetery and other areas of the city this summer, has a showman's style, with booming voice and boisterous sense of humor. He frequently had photos or drawings of people and places of which he spoke.
Hillside Cemetery is 204 years old this year, North Adams' oldest municipal cemetery. The walk began at the top of the hill in the north side of the cemetery, Hillside's oldest section.
"It was started in February of 1798 with this grave right here," Marino said. "That's Olive Knigh, she died at 18 years old. Her parents were farmers in the Braytonville section, and they owned this land.
"Mrs. Knight, whose name was Lellis, gave this entire hill to the town for use as a common burial ground," he said.
Also buried in this section is Nathan Putnam, who died in 1841 at age 52 and was North Adams' first postmaster. He married one of Lellis Knight's daughters. John E. Atwood was a police officer for about five years. But his claim to fame is that as an invalided soldier during the Civil War he was present at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as a member of Massachusetts color guard.
"He sat 20 feet from President Lincoln," Marino said. "In 1904, he delivered the Gettysburg Address himself on Memorial Day."
Nehemiah Hodge was an attorney who invented a railroad brake. "In his day, what they used for railroad brakes was at each end of the car, up on the roof, there was a wheel that operated a brake on the wheels down below," Marino said. "Mr. Hodge invented a brake that could be operated from one location."
"All the railroads that he talked to were very interested in the brake, but they only wanted it as long they didn't have to pay for it," Marino said. "And so he lost a fortune trying to market it."
And shortly after his death, his son took it to New York City and sold it to George Westinghouse. Westinghouse is the man who is credited with having perfected the railroad brake. Marino has not been able to determine whether Hodge's brake was similar to Westinghouse's or if the latter's successful brake was based on Hodge's. The people at Westinghouse Co. don't know.
Amon F. Davenport was North Adams' first college educated dentist. He was born in Rowe, started practicing dentistry in North Adams, and eventually took over an established practice in New York City.
"One of his patients there was a very young Theodore Roosevelt, and he was Theodore's dentist until Theodore turned 14," Marino said. "At that point, he came back to North Adams."
Davenport purchased a grand house with columns on Main Street in North Adams, wanting to build a professional block on the site. "But he wanted the house, too. So he had it cut in half, and moved to its present site off Ashland Street in two pieces," Marino said. "One half was moved one day, the other half the next."
The professional block he built, the Davenport Block, was the first building in North Adams to have plate-glass windows.
One of the most prominent structures in the cemetery is the Tinker mausoleum. Edward Richmond Tinker was involved in a variety of industries, and at one point manufactured gunpowder in Clarksburg, which ended when the plant blew up.
"Tinker was very interested in politics, though he was not interested in being a politician himself. He did a lot of work behind the scenes, and had a lot to do with getting the Hoosac Tunnel built," Marino said. Tinker was a Republican who made a crucial speech for Abraham Lincoln at the 1860 convention in Chicago. "That speech is what turned the tide and won Lincoln the nomination, so they remained close friends."
The tree marking the plot of the Isbell family is one of the most easily identifiable stones in the cemetery. "This is one of the gems of the cemetery. Notice it is a full-sized tree carved out of a single piece of marble. Notice it's set in the ground so it looks as if it grew there," Marino said. "When you get up close you can see and feel the texture of the bark."
The eight people on the walk crossed busy Route 2 and started examining the south section of Hillside. The first stop was a brick mausoleum at the east end of this section. The vault was built for Sylvander Johnson, an industrialist who built the mill on Brown Street and for whom Johnson School was named. His name also became associated with a Civil War army unit from North Adams, the Johnson Grays, which became the Johnson Guard after the Union adopted blue uniforms, Marino said.
Sarah T. Haskins is the first and so far only female educator in North Adams to have a school named for her and, unusual for a naming in honor, this happened while she was still alive, Marino said. Always a stop on Marino's tours of Hillside is the Sullivan monument, built in the 1930s, which features a 10-foot sexy art deco angel.
"This is the most modern stone, I think, in all of North Adams. It's actually old-fashioned now, but it still looks modern," Marino said. "It has an art-deco skyscraper design, and then there's the angel.
"Notice first of all that her wings double as her halo, and then there is her gown, which is of an extremely modern cut," he said. "This gown is also very sheer. ... I am told that the face...was supposed to be modeled after one of their cousins, Alice Nagel."
Two members of Congress are buried in Hillside, U.S. Rep. George Pelton Lawrence, and U.S. Sen. Thomas Ward Osborn. Lawrence was born in North Adams, became an attorney, and was the youngest judge appointed to the bench in Massachusetts.
"While he was in the U.S. House he engineered the funding to get the North Adams Post Office built. Until that time...about 1910, the post office was in the Wilson House Hotel," Marino said. "Lawrence is the one who got the modern place built, and he made sure it was not just a little box like a lot of other towns got. We got a post office to be proud of."
Thomas Ward Osborn hailed from New York City and served as a U.S. senator in Florida after the Civil War.
"I have been told that he was a carpetbagger," Marino said. "Mr. Osborn had nothing to do with North Adams."
The reason he was buried in the city after his death in 1898 is that his brother, Abraham Osborn, was a Baptist minister who was serving in North Adams. Abraham was buried next to his brother upon his death in 1916.
Marino feels that the monument of archaeologist John Henry Haynes is the ultimate gem of the cemetery. Haynes was a Williams College graduate who was involved in several archaeological expeditions, including four to the Babylonian city of Nippur for the University of Pennsylvania.
"He is credited with the discovery of the earliest known Babylonian arch," Marino said. His greatest discovery was the library in the Temple of Bel; a depiction of the temple is featured on his stone.
"They called it a library because they recovered in excess of 18,000 cuneiform tablets... It was his moment of triumph, and it was snatched away from him by a rival archaeologist also sent by Penn."
This rival claimed that he had discovered the library first, not Haynes, who could not comment publicly because he had lost his notebooks. Eventually, Penn held an inquest to determine who had discovered the library. Haynes was in a sanitarium in Massachusetts at the time, but his wife, armed with the rediscovered notebooks, went in his place. The decision was made in the favor of Haynes. Haynes recovered and went out to Los Angeles with his wife, where he worked for the Internal Revenue Service.
In 1910, after his wife's death, Haynes returned to North Adams and moved into his sister's house on Hall Street. He died after a few months.
"When he died he was buried her in his brother-in-law's lot, under a common headstone, and right away some of his friends in academic community...began a fundraising campaign to raise money to erect a more suitable monument," Marino said. "This is what was unveiled in the fall of 1913."
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