“He was finishing a grave, in the Granary yard…”

As I recounted yesterday, Josiah Carter died in late 1774. At the time he was sexton of Boston’s oldest Congregationalist meetinghouse, nicknamed “the Old Brick.”

The most detailed and lively portrait of Carter appeared decades later in Dealings with the Dead, by a Sexton of the Old School (1856). The author was not in fact a sexton but a wealthy Harvard graduate, antiquarian, and anti-Abolitionist named Lucius Manlius Sargent. Since he was born in 1786, Sargent never knew Josiah Carter, so his information is at least second-hand and therefore uncertain.

“JOSIAH CARTER died, at the close of December, 1774,” Sargent wrote. “For good Josiah many wept, I fancy; But none more fluently than Dr. Chauncy.” That would be the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy, minister of the First Meetinghouse.

Sargent then suggested Carter died not only as a sexton but while performing the job of a sexton:

Josiah Carter was sexton of the Old Brick. He died, in the prime of life—fifty only—a martyr to his profession conscientious to a fault—standing all alone in the cold vault, after the last mourner had retired, and knocking gently upon the coffin lid, seeking for some little sign of animation, and begging the corpse, for Heaven’s sake, if it were alive, to say so, in good English.

Carter was one of your real integer vitae [irreproachable in life] men. It is said of him, that he never actually lost his self-government, but once, in his life.

He was finishing a grave, in the Granary yard, and had come out of the pit, and was looking at his work, when a young, surgical sprig came up, and, with something of a mysterious air, shadowed forth a proposition, the substance of which was, that Carter should sell him the corpse—cover it lightly—and aid in removing it, by night.

In an instant, Carter jerked the little chirurgeon into the grave—it was a deep one—and began to fill up, with all his might. The screams of the little fellow drew quite a number to the spot, and he was speedily rescued.

When interrogated, years afterwards, as to his real intentions, at the time, Carter always became solemnized; and said he considered the preservation of that young doctor—a particular Providence.

Despite the questions of reliability, this anecdote is too good not to share.

As for Carter’s father-in-law Thomas Bradford, I quoted how he had retired from the town watch in 1773, unable to walk. In asking the selectmen for a pension, Bradford said he had only “a few Days more to Live.”

In fact, Bradford survived through the siege of Boston. On 8 June 1778 he was admitted into the almshouse. On 13 September he died. The Continental Journal reported that he died “in the 83d Year of his Age.”

(It looks like, due to a smudged digit, this got into Ogden Codman’s Index of Obituaries in Boston Newspapers, 1704-1800 as the death of a man aged 23.)