The Story of the Memorial Tablet: Herbert B. Howe's Scrapbook

The tablet in 2013

A few weeks ago, I was able to read a scrapbook from the Historical Society that had been compiled by Herbert B. Howe, the Village Historian responsible for the beautiful memorial tablet at the cemetery, erected in 1929. After realizing how much great information was contained in the scrapbook, and also that it was in poor condition, I decided to transcribe the various letters and documents inside it. Afterward, I wrote a short introduction to precede the transcribed text. I have posted the introduction here, along with some images, as it may interest some people.

In October of 1928, Village Historian and Presbyterian minister Herbert B. Howe launched an investigation of the village’s oldest landmark, the St. George’s/St. Mark’s Cemetery. Then the director of Earl Hall at Columbia University, Howe called upon fellow professors, clergymen, and local history experts from across Westchester County and New York City to help him delineate the history of the site from its Colonial beginnings through its use in the Revolutionary War and on towards the present. He also traveled to the New-York Historical Society to research the Old North Castle Church and its donor, St. George Talbot. His goal was to create a tablet at the cemetery that would stand as a permanent monument to its role in the foundation of the community. Howe collected all of the letters, articles, and documents associated with this project in a scrapbook currently held at the Historical Society.

Born in New Jersey on October 25, 1882, Herbert Barber Howe was a 1905 graduate of Williams College and married Elizabeth Blossom Runyon in 1909. In 1929 the couple was living on Croton Lake Road with their four children. In addition to his work as village historian and professor, Howe was the author of several books, including a biography of his father George Rowland Howe and genealogies of the Williams and Wood families.

Herbert B. Howe (left) with the Rev. John Cartwell and V. H. Everitt in 1956, with a model of the Bedford Presbyterian Church

One of the first people Howe contacted in his search was his good friend Harold Adye Prichard, Rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church (which had moved from its old site at St. Mark’s Place to downtown in 1911). Born in Clifton, England, in 1882, Prichard was a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford and Johns Hopkins University and an honorary canon of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine who had served as Rector of St. Mark’s since 1914. He was known for his modernist take on theological issues, on which he was a prolific author. He was also interested in the history of his church, though he was forced to relay to Howe the disappointing fact that all of the old records from St. Mark’s had burned in a fire of 1898. “The consequence is, I have no Records of Burials, Baptisms, or anything else, before that date; which sometimes is very inconvenient,” he wrote.

Howe’s next contacts included some of Westchester County’s most prominent men of the 19th and 20th centuries. On October 29, 1928, he conducted interviews with Otto Hufeland and Colonel Thatcher T. P. Luquer. Hufeland, the author of Westchester County During the American Revolution, 1775-1783 (1926) suggested that Howe consult the Rev. Robert Bolton’s History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the County of Westchester (1855); Howe’s scrapbook contains pages of hand-written notes from that book. Colonel Luquer, a soldier and civil engineer, Rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, and founding member and president of the Bedford Historical Society, advised Howe on the military terms appropriate to describe Colonel Tarleton’s use of the church in 1779. Like most of the experts who advised Howe, he was concerned that the text of the monument be as accurate as possible. But no one was as devoted to the accuracy of the monument as Howe himself, whose multiple drafts of the monument’s text – along with copious revisions and additions – are preserved in his scrapbook.

Colonel Thatcher T. P. Luquer with his family on the porch of the St. Matthew's Rectory

Howe’s other contacts included Dixon Ryan Fox, an NYU graduate and fellow Columbia University professor; the Rev. R. Townsend Henshaw, Harvard graduate and Rector of Christ Church in Rye; and Charles J. Dunlap, Princeton graduate, lawyer, and president of the Westchester County Historical Society. Dunlap, who died on July 10, 1930, had hoped to include the unveiling of Howe’s tablet as part of the WCHS’s annual spring pilgrimage throughout Westchester County, but the unveiling ultimately came at too late a date to make that possible. He also enlisted Howe’s help in several WCHS publications of the time. The article requested by Dunlap in his April 8 letter for the Westchester County Historical Bulletin appeared as “St. George’s Church in North Castle” in Volume 24 (1948).

In March 1929,  Mayor Henry Blackeby appointed the Committee on Memorial Tablets for the Old Burying Ground at St. Mark’s Place and East Main Street to complete the work of planning and installing the tablet. Harry E. McTavey, a retail merchant and Village Trustee, served as the chairman of the committee, and Howe as secretary. Other members included Clifton B. White, the Rev. Canon Prichard, Mrs. Walter E. (Emma Halstead) Osborne, and Mrs. J. H. (Julia Gorham) Crane.

Mrs. Crane had a personal interest in the cemetery. She was the daughter of David Fletcher Gorham, who donated the iconic water trough topped with a statue of “Chief Kisco” to the Village in 1907; four cousins and one aunt on her father’s side of the family were interred in the “Old Burying Ground.” Mrs. Osborne may also have had relations in the cemetery; her maiden name, Halstead, was the same as that of Jemima Haight, mother of the infant Nicholas Haight who was buried in the cemetery in 1791.

Stereoview of the village taken by Lyman B. Gorham, uncle of Mrs. J. H. Crane (Jeffrey Kraus Collection)

Mrs. Osborne and Mrs. Crane were charged with fund-raising, and together raised $125 for the restoration of the cemetery, which was in poor condition at the time. However, the issue of the ongoing maintenance of the cemetery remained unresolved. Howe suggested that Mayor Blackeby “plan for the care of this historic place in connection with the plans under your consideration for the proposed Leonard Park,” yet there is no indication that this plan ever went through. Resistance may have stemmed from the fact that the Old Burying Ground – which was, in fact, two cemeteries, one Episcopal and one Methodist – still belonged to the respective churches. “Yet apparently neither of the institutions who claim to own the property feel like assuming anything but a most perfunctory responsibility for the upkeep of the place,” Howe complained to Blackeby. If Howe ever raised this point to Prichard, it is not documented in any of the letters in the scrapbook. The issue wasn’t settled until the 1970s, when the Episcopal and Methodist Churches transferred their properties to the Village.

Shortly after an announcement of the tablet appeared in the paper, Mayor Blackeby received a letter from A(braham) L(incoln) Merritt, superintendent of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, Subway Division, recalling his childhood years spent in the town, where his father had been born and owned a store. “I spent my holidays when a boy at New Castle and fished at day break many the time at Kirby Pond. I often fished back of the horse sheds across the road from the Methodist Church. And the Old burying ground was in the rear background a thousand times,” he wrote.

The announcement seems to have inspired similar feelings of nostalgia and fondness for the old cemetery in other members of the community. Among the eighteen donors who contributed a total of $125 for the cemetery’s upkeep, there are several family names associated with the cemetery, including Thorne, Sarles/Searles, and Baker. Even so, Howe was of the opinion, as he wrote to Charles Dunlap, that “The new commutor [sic] class are more interested in [local] history than the old village families. Sad but true.”

The unveiling of the tablet took place on June 1, 1929, at 2:30 pm, with Mayor Blackeby presiding, and addresses given by the Rev. Canon Prichard and the Rev. Henshaw. Along with details on St. George’s and St. Mark’s Churches, the tablet mentioned “the house directly to the south of this churchyard” – no longer standing – which “was built in 1824 by the Methodist Society and used for worship until 1842.” The Rev. Robert L. Ross represented the Methodist Church at the unveiling.

The tablet in the cemetery, ca. 1930s

Though there seems to have been some debate about it, two crosses were ultimately placed at the top and bottom of the inscription on the tablet. “I do not see why the Cross should be omitted from the Tablet,” Prichard wrote Howe, suggesting that Howe had raised the question with him. “They need not be very large; but there ought to be some emblem to fill in the space at the top and the bottom; and the Cross is at least appropriate.”

Howe and Prichard

Rev. H. Adye Prichard

The letters written by Howe and Prichard that are preserved in Howe’s scrapbook offer a glimpse into their decades-long friendship. Born the same year, the two clergymen had much in common, and enjoyed both theological and personal discussions with one another. In his letter of April 16, 1929, Prichard inquired after Howe’s experience at a recent “spiritualistic meeting.” “Did it interest you?” Prichard wrote. “I should like to hear.” Perhaps Prichard was interested in Spiritualism – a movement that flourished in the United States throughout the late 19th century and reached its peak in the 1920s – as one of the “many channels” that he believed could be used to reach “the Truth,” as he wrote to Howe on June 10, 1929.

Howe’s and Prichard’s letters also point to differences between them. In his June 10 letter, Prichard urged Howe to feel welcome to consult with him “[w]hen the day comes – should it come at all – that you feel that the open acceptance of Confirmation would help you.” He adds, “St. Mark’s needs you in any capacity in which you would be happy.” Was Prichard trying to convert Howe to the Episcopal Church?

Howe’s answer, nearly a month later, leaves the issue unresolved. “Your personal paragraph in the letter was very much appreciated,” he writes. “When the time comes I shall be glad to talk with you. Your kindness and helpfulness in making a church home for us all is greatly appreciated.” In the same letter, Howe mentions that his alma mater, Williams, had offered him a position as dean, an issue that he hopes to discuss with Prichard later. “I had supposed that I was settled here for keeps,” he writes, “but certain aspects of this new situation look very pleasant, and then after all blood is thicker than water and one’s old college appeals.”

1929–present

The tablet erected by the Village in 1929 continues to occupy a prominent place at the front of the cemetery, to the right of the entrance along East Main Street. During the fall 2013 archaeological excavation, the excavation team received two different groups of visitors who said that they had stopped to look at the cemetery not because of the people they saw at work, but because they wanted to read what was on the tablet.

The “tradition,” mentioned by Howe in his April 22 letter to Luquer, that Revolutionary War soldiers were buried in unmarked graves in the southeast corner of the cemetery was partly corroborated in 1960, when builders contracted to straighten a deadly curve in Route 117 by digging into the cemetery unearthed human bones and coffin handles in that area. Several years later, a small marker was placed on the spot by the Chappaqua Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (now defunct), reading simply “Revolutionary War Soldiers Buried Here 1775–1783.”

DAR marker in the cemetery

Though a program of restoration was launched in the 1960s by the St. Mark’s Church Buildings and Grounds Committee, the cemetery had deteriorated significantly by 1973, when a local newspaper reported it “uncared for and overgrown with grass … Brush and weeds in some parts of the cemetery stand higher than some upright gravestones.”

In 1967, Helena Rutherfurd Meade, parishioner of St. Mark’s since 1913, published St. Mark’s Church: A History, detailing the history of the church from Colonial times through the 20th century. Chapter Three is dedicated to the ministry of Reverend Canon Prichard, which lasted forty years until his death on May 7, 1944.

Herbert B. Howe outlived his old friend by more than a decade, dying on May 3, 1957. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, alongside many families associated with the Old Burying Ground.

Over the past year, members of the Historical Society and the Lower Hudson Chapter New York State Archaeological Association (NYSAA) have revisited many of the sources that Howe originally identified in 1928 and 1929. His tablet served as a stepping-off point for a journey that has brought the community literally back to its roots, as it has uncovered the wealth of information buried beneath the ground at the site of the St. George’s and St. Mark’s Churches. In fall of 2013, the excavation team uncovered evidence of the military occupation – including a French gunflint – and of the location of the North Castle Church that Herbert B. Howe would have been much interested to see. His legacy lives on in the role of Village Historian, now occupied by Harry McCartney, and in the Historical Society, which Howe could hardly envision in 1928 but which has since established an active presence.

The team that has carried out the dig continues to investigate issues that Howe and his friends identified in the 1920s. Though he oversaw its removal himself, Prichard was not sure of the date that the Old St. Mark’s Church building had left its original location. “[I]t was still standing on that site when I came here in 1914,” he wrote, “and was not given to the coloured people [the St. Francis A.M.E. Zion Church] until I should say about 1919.” Various accounts given by people who were alive at the time of the transfer disagree as to what part of the church was given and when. Some say the entire building was given; others say just the “timbers.” In another letter, Prichard states that it the church was “transferred originally to the South of Lexington Avenue, then placed on Maple Avenue,” but does not give dates.

Recently we have made some progress toward identifying the soldiers who were buried in the southeast corner of the cemetery. Through a prodigious effort, the White Plains Historical Society has compiled a list of the soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of White Plains. We now have a list of candidates, but no absolute answers as to which of these were actually buried at the Old North Castle Church. We hope to follow the example of the Fishkill Historical Society, which recently successfully identified the Revolutionary War soldiers buried at the Fishkill Supply Depot.

Archaeological excavation is set to resume in spring of 2014. We look forward to carrying on the journey towards historical knowledge that our predecessors began many decades ago.