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| A Holding Tomb |
Last week I went exploring in an old Brewster Cemetery. I found this wooden doorway by accident. It's called a Holding Tomb and was built around 1840.
Holding tombs were necessary before the backhoe came along. Inclement, frigid weather made the ground difficult to hand-dig and the body needed to be stored somewhere, at least until spring or the first thaw. Oftentimes this tomb was used to temporarily store the body until a burial location was decided, or if the family lacked sufficient funds to bury their loved one.
It was renovated in 2015 by the Brewster Cemetery Association.
As I walked up and down the rows of stones, I found the gravestone of Sadie Hassard.
Young Sadie Hassard was being courted by Frederick Alexander Brewster 1896.
Sadie grew tired of him and wanted to move on.
It was a Sunday. Pastor Dawes began reading the opening prayer at the Brewster Unitarian church. The sound of gunshots drew the congregation outside. They found poor Sadie dead on the sidewalk from a gunshot wound behind her right ear.
The
young girl had been living with Pastor Dawes out of fear from
Alexander. Sadie's father knew about Alexander's jealous and desperate
heart. He hoped Sadie would be safer with the Pastor.
Excerpt from The Barnstable Patriot, May 18, 1896,
Another strange glimpse into Brewster's history happened in 1873. The accounting of this event appeared in an Irish newspaper of the same year.
A supposed mermaid was seen upon the beach at Brewster last Thursday by
Mrs. Young and several children. The head of this object, or mermaid,
resembled exactly that of a child, while the rest of the body was of
fish form. When first seen, the lady became frightened, but the children Less timid, approached it, and, wishing to determine whether it was
dead or alive, threw some sand in its eyes, whereupon it uttered cries
like that of a child, and commenced rolling over and over down to the
water, and darted off into the sea, keeping the head above the surface,
and resembling in every manner that of a child swimming. How this
creature came here is yet a mystery, but it is thought it was left here
by the tide, or rolled upon the shore in the night of its own accord’,
(Anon 1873).
Mermaids appear in history beginning in 1000 BC.
One of the earliest mermaid legends appeared in Syria around 1000 BC when the goddess Atargatis dove into a lake to take the form of a fish. As the gods there would not allow her to give up her great beauty, only her bottom half became a fish, and she kept her top half in human form.
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