The Clough Family Bible Comes to Old North

Recently descendants of Ebenezer Clough, the brick mason who built Christ Church (now better known as Old North), donated a family Bible to the institution.

Even before the church went up in 1723, Clough built some nearby residences. One of them was bought for the church in 1959 and now houses offices, store rooms, a gift shop, and the Edes & Gill printing office. That building now carries the builder’s name, pronounced cluff.

The Bible is about as old as that building, printed in London in 1715. A few decades later, Ebenezer and Thankful Clough’s son John started to use it to record family events, including his own birth (retrospectively, of course), his marriage in 1745, and the births (and deaths) of his children.

As the Boston Globe reported and the photo above shows:

While modern Bibles often include pages set aside for family records, Colonists had to improvise, writing in any blank space, even on the title page, where the Clough family Bible records the death of a child by smallpox in 1792.

That volume traveled with members of the family to the Midwest. Eventually they began to pronounce that surname clow. The old family Bible descended into the hands of Harry Bulkeley of Galesburg, Illinois.

Bulkeley was a Resident Circuit Judge of Knox County. He’s also a big history buff, portraying Ulysses S. Grant at Civil War reenactments, leading graveyard tours, and writing opinion pieces for the local newspaper.

Visiting a daughter in Massachusetts about twenty years ago, Bulkeley saw the name of Ebenezer Clough on a plaque at the Old North complex and recognized it from the family history. Eventually he and his relatives decided to donate the Bible to the church to preserve and share with new generations of visitors.

Digging in the North End

Yesterday’s Boston Globe offered a progress report on a little dig in Boston’s North End. As part of a renovation project, the Old North Church’s, they invited the city’s archeology department to excavate the back yard of the Ebenezer Clough house, built around 1715.

The result:

During two weeks of digging, Bagley and a crew of volunteers collected tens of thousands of items from the 1700s. The haul included long-ago leftovers of everyday life: animal bones, doll parts, and uncounted chips and fragments of dishes and cups that archeologists hope will reveal more about how Bostonians lived as a bustling city sprang up around them.

“They literally would have just thrown these out the window,” Bagley said of a time when the backyard served as a personal landfill. “This will tell a lot about what people were eating, what toys they were using, and what else was going in the backyard.”

The dig also will give archeologists the rare chance to study a North End site untouched by development. From its beginnings as a pasture, this tiny plot of earth at 21 Unity St. has never been built upon, Bagley said. . . .

The finds include porcelain from China, children’s marbles, a cow or pig tooth, German stoneware, pipe stems, and a ceramic fragment decorated with a painted thistle, possibly from Scotland. Archeologists even found a rat’s skeleton.

In the early 1800s the building became an apartment house, or tenement, owned by upholsterer Moses Grant (1744-1817), one of the guys involved in the pre-Revolutionary events I focus on.

The Globe also offered a slide show of the dig. The overhead image above comes from that collection by staff photographer Pat Greenhouse.