Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
half of them sick with bloody flux."
We can not now follow the good chaplain in his deeply interesting
narrative. He makes no mention in it of his family, but it is certain
from other data that he left Mrs. Norton and his young children in
garrison at Fort Shirley, and that just about the time of his return
from captivity to Boston, which was August 16, 1747, his little girl,
Anna, died at the fort and was buried in the field a little to the west
of it. Probably some soldier in the fort chiselled upon the rude stone
the inscription as follows:
Hear lys ye body of An'na
D: of ye Rev:
Mr. John Norton. She died
Aug; ye ---- aged ---- 1747.
This stone stood there in the bleak field exposed to the suns of summer
and the storms of winter for more than one hundred and thirty years. The
day of August on which she died and the number of years she had lived
have become illegible by exposure,--impossible to be deciphered. The
stone has lately been removed to Williams College, and with its
companion relic, a stick of one of the timbers of Fort Shirley, and a
few other memorials of the well and fort, are safe in a fire-proof
building.
The tradition is still lively in Heath, and it may well be an historical
fact for it has been handed down by an aged citizen there whose life
began with the century, that there used to come up from Connecticut on
an occasional pilgrimage to the site of Fort Shirley and particularly to
the grave of Anna Norton some of her relatives. This is very likely; for
John Norton became in 1748 a pastor in the parish of East Hampton,
Middlesex Co., Conn., where he died in 1778; and one may still read on
his tombstone there the following inscription:
IN MEMORY OF
THE REV. JOHN NORTON
PASTOR OF THE 3D CHURCH IN CHATHAM
WHO DIED WITH SMALL POX
MARCH 24th AD 1778
IN THE 63D YEAR OF HIS AGE.
He left several children. Among them an unmarried daughter, who lived
till 1825. It is no mean touch and print of vital human sympathy that is
left upon the sod beneath the great tree in Shirley-field by the figure
of one who came and came again from a distant place to catch, it may be,
a note from the dreary Past and drop a tear upon the grave of a sister
whom she never saw.
To his Excellency William Shirley, Esq. Capt. Gen. and Gov'r in Chief
of this Province, the Hon'ble his Majesty's Council & House of
Representatives in Gen. Court assembled--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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