St. Paul's Church National Historic Site

After St. John's, Laurie and I went to the St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, a beautiful eighteenth-century church and graveyard incongruously situated in the middle of the very urban Mount Vernon (not to be confused with the home of George Washington in Virginia). The site includes a little museum in a building previously used as a barn by parishioners.

The cemetery at St. Paul's spans five acres and actually consists of two distinct graveyards: the church cemetery, which dates back to the eighteenth century, and the later city cemetery. Notable burials include the Irish-American landscape painter Edward Gay, members of the Pell (as in Pelham Manor) and Fowler families (my relatives), Revolutionary War soldiers, and several captains (who are clustered together in an informal "captain section").


Like St. George's, St. Paul's was used as a military hospital during the Revolutionary War. However, the construction of the building wasn't completed until after the war, which meant that the soldiers who were brought there had to lie on straw on the bare ground. Below are reproductions of some of the surgical instruments that would have been used at that time. My two main thoughts while looking at these were: 1) that saw is terrifying and 2) if we found any of these instruments in our dig, my head would probably explode with excitement.




Also like St. George's, St. Paul's was an Episcopal church, although it was transferred from the Episcopal Diocese to the National Park Service in the 1970s - the same decade that St. Mark's and the Methodist Church transferred their historic cemeteries to the town. Below is a little model of St. Paul's that stands inside of the church. We might one day be able to build a similar model of St. Mark's Church based on photographs, documents, and our archaeological findings. A reconstruction of St. George's may be more difficult.


Another similarity between St. Mark's and St. Paul's: both were the second churches to stand on their respective sites. The earlier church was much smaller and stood perhaps a few dozen yards away from the present church. Though I didn't take a picture of it, there is a wonderful little diorama in the museum that shows the destruction of the old church and the unfinished state of St. Paul's in the midst of the Revolutionary War. I have seen similar dioramas in a local history museum in England and thought they were just fantastic. I would love to build one for our site.

The photo above shows the interior of St. Paul's, which was restored to its eighteenth-century appearance in the 1940s. All of the pew boxes you see are reconstructions based on an original 1787 pew plan. Each box bears the name of its original owner. The reconstructions are a striking visual representation of the stratification that would have existed between members of the community.

While in the church we had the opportunity to visit the bell tower. The steeple is a later addition of the nineteenth century, but the bell inside (shown below) dates back to the eighteenth century. According to legend, it was buried to prevent it from being melted down for ammunition during the Revolution.

Speaking of burying, here's a view of the cemetery from the top of the tower.

The cemetery features some really fantastic stones, ranging from the eighteenth century all the way to the present (it is still in use). The stone of Elezabeth [sic] Clements, below, is one of the older in the cemetery and dates to 1762. I love the spiral finials.

This 1786 stone, belonging to Anne Underhill, is propped up against the side of the church and features a moving verse: "Weep not For me my parents Dear / I am not Dead But Sleepeth hear / The Dept Is paid my grave you see / Pepair for deth and follow me." (I may have transcribed that wrong, as I'm not sure why a 63-year-old woman would tell her parents not to weep for her, unless she had some very long-lived parents.)

The beautiful monument below is actually made of sandstone. Can you believe it? I've never seen anything like it. It dates to the 1830s, which is actually on the earlier side (I believe) for this style of monument, and on the later side for a monument of sandstone (in my experience most stones from the 1810s on are made of marble). If my assessment is right, then this monument is both a precursor and a throwback.

Here's one of the captains I mentioned before. Major Samuel T. Pell died at the age of 32 in 1786 and has quite an elaborate sandstone monument. I've never seen a design like this before and am inclined to think it's somewhat of an experiment on the part of the carver, although I could be wrong. There's just so much in it - banners, cherubs, a classical bust on a drum (?).

Later on, in the museum, our very knowledgeable tour guide Stefano showed us the ledger of burials from the city cemetery that he's been working to digitize. The ledger spans the 1890s to the 1930s and features detailed information on many of the people buried in the cemetery, including those buried in the mass grave (mainly stillborns and, presumably, people who couldn't afford their own burial plots).

It's nice to know that I'm not the only person interested in knowing the cause of death of people buried in old cemeteries. Since there is no equivalent record of the burials in our cemetery (that we've found), I've had to rely on obituaries and mortality schedules to determine how people died. So far I've only identified cause of death for 24 people.


Thanks so much to Stefano for the wonderful tour. I feel that with every church and graveyard we visit, we gain a little more insight into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious and mortuary practice, and this site was no exception. Furthermore, the educational displays at St. Paul's have given me a lot of great ideas on how to approach education at our site. Maybe one day our town will open a museum of its own using the artifacts and the information we've gained through our excavation and research. We'll see!