Cemetery stones

My wife and I love to travel around and find cemeteries and look for unusual and different stones because they always tell us a story. Teresa, my wife writes a lot of blogs on carvers and forgotten cemeteries but I thought I would write a few on some interesting headstones that we have found.

This past weekend we were excited to have found a very unique set of stones in cemetery located in Leominster MA. Pine Grove Cemetery is the oldest of four cemeteries located in the city of Leominster and was established in 1742 next to the town’s first meeting house. Pine grove was closed to burial in 1937 and has one of the heaviest concentrations of war veterans on the grounds.  There are 94 “known” Revolutionary War burials, 4 burials from the Civil War and 30 from the War of 1812.

Finding matching headstones and footstones is not that common; usually the footstone only has initials. We were excited to find a double headstone nicely carved with a matching double footstone completely carved to match the headstone. This was a very rare find so of course we photographed everything and admired this spectacular find. Then Teresa noticed at the bottom of the headstone there were two sets of numbers that would have buried at one point. 1-10-0 was the first set and 2-0-0 was the second. What could these numbers be?

The next thing that I noticed was the names on this Headstone were that of Daniel Knight died Oct, 27th  1767 at the age of 78 and the other half of the stone was Gershom Houghton  died April 3rd 1757 at the age of 66. What intrigued me was 2 men with different last names on one stone, are they related? I had to find out what the link was between these two men. I fired up the computer and searched the name Daniel Knight and it did not take too long to find out the common thread.  Gershom Houghton and his wife Elizabeth had the first house built in Leominster MA. When Elizabeth’s Husband died in 1757 she then married Daniel knight who had lost first 2 wives previously. He passed away in 1767 and she had the double headstone made for her two late husbands. I have seen many stones with 1st wife 2nd wife and even 3rd and 4th but this is the first time I have seen one made for multiple husbands.

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