How Many British Soldiers Are Buried beside the North Bridge?
On some night late in 1891, George R. Brooks and other local worthies took a cranium given up by the Worcester Society of Antiquity and interred it in the patch of ground beside the bridge long marked as the grave of two redcoats.
In doing so, they believed they were restoring one of two skulls that had been removed from that grave decades before.
That would have left slightly less than two British soldiers buried there.
Those men were convinced that the phrenologist Walton Felch had dug up those skulls with the permission of the Concord selectmen back around 1840, shortly after the town had erected its obelisk monument to the fighting on 19 Apr 1775.
They were also convinced that the skull they had failed to return was damaged, based on a series of musts:
- If the two skulls were unearthed in Concord, they must have come from the grave beside the North Bridge because that was the only grave of British soldiers in town with two bodies.
- If the skulls came from the grave at the North Bridge, they must have belonged to the soldiers killed at that bridge, including the one Ammi White hit in the head with a hatchet.
- If one of those skulls came from a man killed by a hatchet blow to the head, that skull must have shown severe damage.
But what if the initial premise of that logical chain was wrong? Because that’s what the evidence from ante-bellum Concord says.
First of all, in 1840 schoolboy Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., went to hear the phrenologist Walton Felch at the Concord Lyceum. Right afterward, Edmund wrote in his diary that the man had the top part of the skull of a British soldier with a bullet hole through it, and that cranium had been “dug up in Lincoln,” not Concord.
Second, in 1850 Henry David Thoreau spoke with William Wheeler, who described seeing Felch dig up two skulls years before in an “almost unused graveyard in Lincoln.” Wheeler’s description of a bullet hole through one cranium matched young Edmund’s.
Third, in 1836 the town of Concord chose to erect its monument near where two soldiers had been shot and buried. Lots of people paid attention to that spot, including the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other town leaders. There was also a contingent in Concord who had wanted the monument built elsewhere. The selectmen couldn’t have authorized opening the soldiers’ graves without people in town knowing, and at least some of them criticizing the idea. There would have been no secrets.
In contrast, Lincoln had had a lot more British soldiers to bury back in April 1775. So many that local men simply carted those bodies to the town burying-ground and placed them in a single grave in the paupers’ section. By the 1830s that old cemetery was largely ignored. Lincoln didn’t put up any marker for those bodies until 1884. In sum, few people in Lincoln probably cared whether those bodies were disturbed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln’s town records from the late 1830s show the selectmen granting Felch permission to explore the cemetery. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those records say nothing about Felch’s request; the selectmen may not have cared enough to take formal action. Unlike in Concord, how to treat the remains of British soldiers in Lincoln wasn’t a monumental decision.
In the following years Felch described his skulls as those of soldiers killed in the “Battle of Concord.” Some listeners heard, or remembered, that as meaning the soldiers had died in the town of Concord. By the time Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave were asking his widow about the skulls, Felch wasn’t around to correct that idea. So those men and their Worcester Society of Antiquity colleagues understood the skulls as having come from Concord.
That mistaken belief led to museum labels and newspaper articles about the remaining skull from Concord—reportedly unearthed with the selectmen’s approval. Men from Concord started to whisper about how that reflected on them and their forefathers. They constructed the logical chain above. And ultimately we reach the moment in 1891 when Concord antiquarians were secretly digging in the dirt beside the North Bridge, not to investigate but to partially rectify a breach of etiquette from fifty years before.
But that wasn’t really necessary. The last time that skull had been in Concord, it was still healthy, even if its owner might have come under fire. That soldier didn’t die until a bullet pierced his brain in Lincoln. In 1891 the rest of that man’s body was still in Lincoln, and whatever remains of it is there now.
Buried in the grave beside Concord’s North Bridge are slightly more than two British soldiers.
4 comments:
And, oddly enough, the grave isn't even where the actual burial site is, apparently.
In 2005, the NPS conducted ground-penetrating radar studies in the vicinity. The researchers found that the only area of deep, disturbed ground near the grave site (indicating a burial site) is not at the marked grave, but near the base of the 1836 monument.
After the bridge was removed in 1793, eventually, to satisfy increasing numbers of visitors on a pilgrimage to the site of The Shot Heard 'Round the World, the town put in a carriage turnaround, so that one could walk or ride down to the place where the bridge had been. Various markers, such as the footstone and headstone, got moved out of the way.
This provided access and kept the historical and commemorative aspects visible to visitors, but over time, the successive monuments put up to the British soldiers were, let's face it, in the wrong place.
That’s very interesting. I suppose the memorial could still qualify as “close enough.” But it raises a couple of questions.
First, the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley drew attention to the plain stones in his book on the battle. He was also around when any roadwork was done in the 1790s, and at some point became owner of that land. So was he hiding knowledge of the stones having been moved when he wrote?
Second, did the memory of the stones’ original place survive the building of the monument and the fixing up of the new grave? When Brooks and his colleagues placed the loose skull in the ground, did they do so where the grave markers sat, or where the original burial was?
According to the gossipy Boston Globe article, the diggers on that occasion found skeletons without skulls. I’ve always been dubious about that detail, but this archeological finding makes it even less likely.
I misread when the road to the former bridge might have been altered. But since Ripley lived such a long time, the point still stands: he would have seen any change in where the stones marking the soldiers’ grave lay, and presumably approved of it.
One can only guess. It may be that Ripley and others knew where the stones were supposed to actually be, but public pressure to keep the area accessible began to change the accepted narrative, and in time, people other forgot, or chose not to remember publicly. What one generation sees as changed, the next sees as accepted fact.
Changing the historic landscape to commemorate is not unknown; look what the Prince of Orange had done in his name, creating the Lion Mound at Waterloo. The battlefield became utterly unrecognizable, just to satisfy his whims.
In Concord, at the North Bridge, eventually a stone wall was returned, moved, or modified along the allée to the bridge and a simple large gravestone, and eventually a more elaborate one, is placed in line with the wall there in 1910. Posts and chains there date from 1877. In front of the moved head- and footstones.... in time, the view becomes accepted fact, because nobody knows- or says- different.
But when the park took over the care and upkeep of the bridge area, the agreement was to preserve and not change what was already there, in keeping with NPS policy. Hence, no excavations of the graves, which would create even bigger problems for all concerned. Let sleeping dogs (and Redcoats) lie.
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