Dr. Henry Burchsted and the Whale

On 9 Dec 1755, Richard Pratt of Lynn wrote in his journal:

Was a Whale taken up at Sea and Brought in To Kings-Beach abought 75 feet Long

King’s Beach now straddles Lynn and Swampscott, but at this time Swampscott had not yet broken off.

The 15 December Boston Gazette reported:

We hear that a large Whale 75 Feet in length, was drove ashore dead on Lynn Beach a few Days ago.

The same day’s Boston Evening-Post added:

’Tis said she is claimed by a Cape-Cod Man, who struck her on the Banks, and 2 of his Irons were found in her. Several curious Persons from this Town have been down to view her.

Almost seventy-five years later, Alonzo Lewis shifted the whale’s gender and added a new detail as he wrote in his History of Lynn (1829):

Dr. Henry Burchsted rode into his mouth, in a chair drawn by a horse; and afterward had two of his bones set up for gate posts, at his house in Essex street, where they stood for more than fifty years.

Dr. Burchsted (1719–1807) was a third-generation physician. His grandfather had reportedly immigrated from Silesia about 1685. His father had died earlier that year. At least one of his brothers also went into medicine.

Because there’s a line of overlapping Henry Burchsteds, their genealogy isn’t entirely clear, but it looks like this physician married Anna Potter in 1742 and had a child, naturally named Henry, a short time later. At the start of the Revolutionary War, Dr. Burchsted owned one slave.

The doctor’s striking gate of whalebones “disposed in the form of a gothic arch” stood near the foot of High Rock, now a park with a tall stone observatory.

The doctor’s son Henry grew up to become a shoemaker on Boston Street, and another physician bought the house with the whalebone gate. That landmark was really helpful, local chroniclers said, for people trying to find their way to the fortune-teller Moll Pitcher, who lived in a small cottage nearby.

(The photo above shows not Dr. Burchsted’s gate, which is long gone, but a similar arch erected in front of the Captain Edward Penniman House in the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1969. This picture was taken shortly before those bones were taken down in 2018 because they were deteriorating, also after about fifty years.)