Although we recollect seeing the stone some years ago, when the whole inscription could be read, we visited the spot in April, 1885, and found only a small portion left,—a triangular piece, perhaps a foot and a half high on one side, at the bottom of which we could only make out: "A.D. 1788, ... the tears of strangers watered her grave." For years, young persons of a romantic turn of mind have visited the grave and chipped off small pieces of the freestone for relics. This modern habit of chipping monumental stones for relics is inexcusable; for it is not done by ignorant or otherwise lawless persons, but too often by the educated, who carry their mawkish sentiment to such an extreme as to deface and sometimes, as in the present case, entirely to ruin a monument. It is in vain to urge that this was only a stranger's stone, and that there were none to care. It was all the more an outrage, if there were no friends to protect it. We are glad to learn that there were people in the town who did what they could to prevent this sacrilege.
The following account of this unfortunate lady we take from Hanson's "History of Danvers:"—
"Elizabeth Whitman came from a very respectable family in Connecticut, where her father was a clergyman. She was possessed of an ardent poetical temperament, an inordinate love of praise, and was gifted with the natural endowment of beauty and perfect grace, while she was accomplished with those refinements which education can bestow. She was lovely beyond words. But her natural amiabilities were warped and perverted by reading great numbers of romances, to the exclusion of almost all other reading. She formed her idea of men by the exaggerated standards she saw in the books to which she resorted; and thus when she looked around her she saw no one who realized her ideal. She subsequently became intimate with a lawyer, said to be the Honourable (?) Judge Pierpont Edwards."
We next hear of her in Danvers, "where the novelty of her situation," continues Hanson, "and her attractive beauty and manners during her short sojourn, caused the entire village and many from the neighboring towns to attend her funeral. A few weeks after her burial, an unknown hand erected the gravestone with its eloquent inscription." The stone is evidently Connecticut sandstone or freestone. Mr. Hanson says of the volume "Eliza Wharton": "The catchpenny volume of letters which pretend to give her history has but the figments of the imagination of its authoress to recommend it."
Picture of the old Bell Tavern in Danvers. From the "Salem Gazette," January, 1781.
Danvers, Jan. 1781.
Juſt publiſhed,
And to be SOLD by
E. RUSSELL,
at his Printing-Office,
near the Bell-Tavern;
The Second Edition of
Ruſſell's American ALMANACK,
For the Year of our Redemption, 1781.