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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 25 August 2004 |
Long Littleton probe yields surprises, but no Lucy Kimball Mead
By PETER WARD, Sun Staff
LITTLETON Where's Lucy?
No bones about it, it's a question that prompted Walter Higgins to play Indiana Jones last year when he and a team of forensic experts cracked open Lucy Kimball Mead's tomb at the Old Burying Ground.
Now, after a yearlong examination by archaeologists, bone specialists and genealogists, he's still asking.
"There's plenty of bones in there but they're not Lucy's," said Higgins, superintendent of this graveyard and nearby Westlawn Cemetery.
So where are the remains of the 31-year-old mother of four, who died in 1831 and was presumably laid to rest in a secluded spot here?
And why does he care?
Higgins, who called himself naturally "nosy and curious," sparked an interest in Lucy a few years ago when he launched an effort to restore the old graveyard. He pruned overgrown trees, straightened slumping gravestones and had old iron gates repaired.
He noticed that Mead's tomb, on a lonely spot on White Street, had had its slate door filled with rubble, a former administrator's response to the crypt's vandalism decades before.
Higgins scraped the entrance's surface, so he could see Mead's name.
Peeking inside, he wondered if the smattering of bones on the cold dirt floor really belonged to Mead and if not, to whom?
Authorities officially opened it on April 8, 2003, to itemize the tomb's contents.
There were liquor bottles, a mishmash of bones, even a toy sheriff's badge.
Bones had been jostled or removed.
Curiously, no skulls were present.
"Whoever vandalized it took the skulls. I'm guessing in the 1950s or '60s," Higgins said.
(Authorities promise not to penalize anyone who comes forward with Lucy's skull or other tomb belongings.)
The team scraped the tomb floor "down to glacial level," collecting fragments of bones, coffin wood and metal fittings, clothes and buttons.
Apart from the poisonous spiders that required workers to wear full-length suits, the archaeologists found many surprises.
They found 1,700 animal bones, mostly belonging to groundhogs, shrews, at least eight rabbits, a snake and other unfortunate creatures that got trapped inside the dark tomb.
But other findings were more significant.
They found bones suggesting a man of an age between 61 1/2 and 86.
This may have been Mead's brother, Benjamin Kimball, who was known to have died in Littleton in 1858. On his death certificate, the cause was listed as suicide.
"We were expecting Lucy to be in there, so it was surprising to find a large male," said Martin Dudek, laboratory director at Timelines Inc., the Littleton archaeological firm doing the work.
Based on the arthritis detected in the skeleton's joints and mild osteoporosis, he was likely a farmer.
"He looks like a guy who often knelt on the ground to plant," Higgins said.
"The feeling is the bones may be Lucy's brother who committed suicide. Because he committed suicide, he probably couldn't be buried at Westlawn. You know, the shame of it."
A second group of bones consisted of a finger bone and two small ankle bones of a petite female, possibly Lucy.
They also retrieved small bones of a boy thought to be between 4 1/2 and 8 years old. He may have been Sherman Dix Mead, a child from Benjamin's second marriage who died in 1837.
Higgins and Dudek believe Mead's bones are about a mile away, at Westlawn, where there is a grave marked for the Mead and Kimball families.
Lucy Kimball was not a special woman, just ill-fated. She was born in 1789, married Abraham Mead in 1821, and had four children, one of whom died in her 30s.
A year after Mead died, her husband married Sally Sherwin, who is buried at Westlawn under an engraved marker that includes the names of Abraham and Lucy.
Higgins tried, without success, to find Mead's likeness.
Higgins, who has a penchant for learning history, has for about five years taken up projects to spruce up the graves and grounds. It takes money, though. At first, after learning how to fill out the applications, he was able to wrest $75,000 from preservation grants.
Another $15,000 to $20,000 was needed for Lucy Mead.
It came from the foundation launched by the late Vinnie Couper, a fabled farmer who wrote endearing stories about his hometown of Littleton and often went barefoot.
But the tomb project took longer and was more involved than people expected.
For one thing, said Dudek, the tomb is much larger than it appeared.
"Instead of one week to extricate, it took a month, and it's been a lot of work," he said.
As a result, the allotment of money dried up before Lucy's mystery could be conclusively resolved. That could require the exhumation of the Mead grave at Westlawn.
Higgins said he's simply not interested in confirming his theory that Lucy is there.
"I'm sure she's in the other cemetery," he said.
Now that the Mead bones are photographed and catalogued, they'll be carefully placed in a simple wood casket and returned to the Old Burying Ground. Timelines needed a state permit to exhume the bones and will need another to put them back.
"So after three years of hard work, who is really buried in Lucy's tomb?" asked Higgins. "Certainly not Lucy."
Peter Ward's e-mail address is
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http://www.lowellsun.com/Stories/0,1413,105~4761~2355695,00.html |
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