Thomas Williston, Doorkeeper

Yesterday I introduced Thomas Williston, sexton of Boston’s Old Brick (First) Meeting-House starting in the 1740s.

Williston also took on jobs for the town of Boston. Some of those were tied to his work as a church sexton, such as winding his meetinghouse’s clock and burying the dead. Others were civic tasks, as in managing the weekly traffic of farm wagons at the marketplace.

In June 1754 the town government offered another job: “Mr. Thomas Williston is appointed to attend the Select men in the room of Mr. John Savel who by reason of Age and Infirmities cannot attend the business.” Williston was also given “the care and Oversight of all the Watches in the Town.” And he was still the sexton at the Old Brick.

Thomas Williston’s official title was doorkeeper at Faneuil Hall. As such, he continued to patrol the marketplace, arranged to illuminate the building after the capture of Montreal in 1760, and the next year took down “the Potts & other Iron Ware” from the walls and hung “the Town Ladders” there instead.

But being doorkeeper also involved a lot of running around Boston. In 1758 the selectmen empowered Williston to enforce the town’s newly revised by-laws, including speed limits on vehicles. They sent him out on the water to warn ship captains against unloading “French neutrals” or possible smallpox patients. Along with Deacon William Larrabee, Williston was assigned to warn newcomers out of town—though he did that for only a few months, Robert Love’s Warnings reports. At different times Williston summoned new officeholders, tax collectors, and heads of fire companies to meet with the selectmen at Faneuil Hall.

For the annual inspection of the schools, Williston contacted the many respected gentlemen chosen for that committee. He also visited the two grammar-school masters to obtain the names of the graduating scholars so the selectmen could invite their parents to a dinner at Faneuil Hall. (Students leaving the three writing schools didn’t get a party.)

Some of Williston’s assignments overlapped with his roles as gravedigger, bellringer, and watchman. For example, in March 1761 he informed tomb owners they were responsible for paying to repair a wall of the burying ground. But he could also be told to deliver the seals to the newly elected sealers of leather, inspect leaning chimneys, and warn property owners about dangerous drains.

Williston’s busiest months on record were during the smallpox epidemic of 1764. He appears over and over in the selectmen’s minutes: tracking down reported patients, moving some to the hospital at New Boston in the town sedan chair, installing flags and guards (including his brother Ichabod) outside quarantined homes, hiring and dismissing nurses, smoking homes and clothing, and burying the dead under special arrangements to contain the disease. Thomas, his brother John, his other brother Ichabod, and Ichabod’s wife Elizabeth all got extra pay during those months.

After army regiments arrived in Boston in October 1768, Thomas Williston had the task of telling British officers that the selectmen wanted to speak to them—a potentially volatile clash of authorities. In November he summoned two officers accused of having “insulted & interrupted” the Dock Watch; those officers apologized for being drunk. In July 1770 “Mr. Williston, Door-keeper to the Select-men,” carried a letter from a town committee to Capt. Thomas Preston in the town jail. In September, some sick soldiers came back from Castle Island to enter “the Hospital in the Common”; the selectmen had Williston summon regimental surgeon Charles Hall for consultation.

In sum, Thomas Williston was well known in Boston, the liaison between the town’s highest elected officials and citizens of all sorts. He was based at Faneuil Hall and the Old Brick Meeting-House, but he could show up anywhere in the course of his duties.

On 18 Feb 1773, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy reported the death of Thomas Williston, “sexton of the Old-Brick, and doorkeeper of Faneuil hall.” He was buried in the Granary Burying Ground with his wife Sarah, who had died on Christmas Day in 1771.

Four days later the selectmen met in Faneuil Hall. Those men, “taking into consideration who was a proper Person to fill up the place of Mr. Thomas Williston, who for a number of years had attended them on the Towns Business; Agreed to give the Offer of the office to Mr. William Barrett Sexton of Dr. [Samuel] Coopers Church” on Brattle Street.

Williston’s successor as sexton of the First Meeting-house and, as of 31 March, as a town-approved gravedigger was Josiah Carter. As I discussed here, he had also been a town watchman. However, Carter lasted in that sexton’s job less than two years after Williston’s demise.

“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.)

Watchmen in the Family

Josiah Carter was born on 31 Aug 1726, one of the nine children of Josiah and Lydia (Ambrose) Carter arriving between 1724 and 1738. He was baptized the next day in Boston’s First Meetinghouse, nicknamed “the Old Brick.”

Josiah’s father might have been the Josiah Carter who advertised psalm-singing lessons at his house on Union Street in the late 1740s.

It’s also possible that Josiah’s mother died and his father married Lydia Thayer in 1741 and had five more children between 1742 and 1749. There was certainly a Josiah and Lydia Carter active in that decade.

On 23 Apr 1763, the Rev. Andrew Eliot of the New North Meetinghouse married Josiah, Jr., to Mary Bradford. She was probably a daughter of Thomas Bradford, born in 1729. (There was another Mary Bradford born to other parents the year before, so I can’t be completely certain, but I’m going to proceed on that assumption.)

Josiah and Mary’s first daughter, also named Mary, was baptized in the First Meetinghouse on 15 Apr 1764. In regular order they had:

• Lucy (1765).
• Thomas Bradford (1767), named after his maternal grandfather.
• Josiah (1769), possibly named in honor of his paternal grandfather; his father stopped being designated “Jr.” at this time.
• John (1771).

Thomas Bradford had worked as one of Boston’s watchmen since 1734, patrolling the streets at night. The arrival of four British regiments in late 1768 complicated that job. Army officers resented having to answer to these working-class civilians, and there were several brawls between them and the watchmen.

Boston’s selectmen responded by beefing up law enforcement with new watches, including a “New South Watch” in October 1769. Bradford was one of the veterans assigned to that squad. In fact, the town made him acting “Constable of the South Watch”; I quoted his commission from the selectmen back here.

After the Massacre and the removal of the troops, the selectmen cut back on the watches in late 1770. Then, pressed by the public in town meeting, they reinstated a “South Watch near the Lamb Tavern” in early 1771 and put Bradford in charge.

Back in 1765, Josiah Carter had joined his father-in-law among the watchmen. He became part of Constable Bradford’s squad in 1771. The next year, the town appointed a fourth man to that watch; usually there were only three, but maybe they needed more manpower to cover all the nights. In November 1772, the selectmen replaced Bradford as Constable. It’s possible he hadn’t been up to the job for a while.

On 16 March 1773, Bradford later recounted, “i was carred Home from the Watch taken with a pain in my right Legg i Could not put it to ye. Ground.“ At the end of April, his daughters were still dressing his leg, and “i Have ben Con find for about a month.”

At age seventy-five, Bradford told the selectmen, he thought he had “but a few Days more to Live and now I intend to retier and to Take my Natrel Rest.” He asked for a small pension, enough for “a Littel fier & bread,” since he had no other income.

Josiah Carter’s name stopped appearing on surviving records of the Boston watch after March 1773, just as his father-in-law retired. Perhaps that was when he left town employ and became sexton at the First Meetinghouse, where he and his children had been baptized. That job involved looking after the church building and digging graves for its congregants.

The next we hear of Carter is in the 2 Jan 1775 Boston Evening-Post’s death notices:

Mr. Josiah Carter, aged 50. Sexton of the Old Brick, or first Church, in this Town.

Printer John Boyle recorded that Carter had died on 28 December. He was in fact only forty-eight years old.

TOMORROW: Josiah Carter and the young doctor.