THE MYSTERIOUS VAULT
BUILT BY SMUGGLERS, IT BECOMES A BURIAL PLACE FOR THE DEAD-MY ANCIENT FRIEND'S STORY.
The Railroad Company, at its own expense, will re-inter the bodies of the dead under the supervision of an undertaker, and such reinterment, if desired, will be in ground provided by the Company.
-H. LYNDE HARRISON.
These were Judge Harrison's words, addressed to the Railroad Commissioners at the Greenwich station last week and duly recorded in the GRAPHIC. This business of the hour was the submission for approval of the new layout, and the locality being discussed was the private cemetery on the Dougan property, near the Field Point Road.
Who were these dead, whose bones are to be lifted from beneath the rattle and roar of the Consolidated trains? I had never heard of such a cemetery, and even Mr. Parker was in doubt about its existence.
But he promptly sent a hall boy for my ancient friend who gave me its entire history. I repeat as nearly as I can the old man's words.
"About the year 1750 there came to this town from New York one William Bush, a young man of great wealth, the only son of a retired shipping merchant. His shoe-buckles were of the finest wrought silver and his small clothes were of the choicest silk. He had the swiftest horses, the sleekest oxen and the greatest herd of sheep of any man hereabouts and his acres for broad and fertile.
"He built himself a home that was the talk of the town, and when he died he left a will duly probated January 8, 1802, that disposed of a large estate.
"The century in which he died his still with us, but no one in life to-day remembers William Bush. My knowledge of him comes from my father, who was his neighbor and regarded him with the highest esteem. His landed property included a large part of the southern portion of the town, and extended east almost to Cos Cob. Its northern boundary ran across the Field Point road near the residence of James R Mead.
"The cemetery was laid out by Captain Bush, as he was called, about five years after his arrival in town, and was designed wholly for a family burial place. But in the years immediately following the Revolutionary war, the burials there were numerous and graves were made on all sides, far beyond the present narrow limits of the cemetery. On the outskirts many slaves were buried, in the picks and spade of the Italian will turn up many an unexpected thigh-bone. The use of the cemetery has never been limited to the lineal heirs of Captain Bush, and many of his collateral heirs were buried there.
"Hence we have the names upon the stones of Bush Mead, Mary A. Sherwood, Matthew Mead, Mrs. Stephen Marshall, Rebecca Gilmore, Polly Mead and Justus B. Mead.
"In the center of the plot is a vault, the roof of which is nearly level with the surrounding ground, and to one one unacquainted with the fact, its existence its existence would be unsuspected.
"A weird story, the truth of which has never been questioned, is told of this vault and the proof of its truth will be revealed when the old vault is laid open to the sunlight. Before the Revolutionary war Great Britain levied a tax upon imports to the American colonies, Before the Revolutionary war Great Britain levied a tax imports to the American colonies, the West India trade being included in the impost. The tax upon sugar, molasses and rum was particularly obnoxious to the colonists, and smuggling these commodities into the country through Long Island Sound, was indulged in to a considerable extent.
"Smuggled goods were secreted in barns, potato cellars, amid caves in the rocks and in most cases beyond the reach of the revenue officers, although at times arrests and punishment followed such violations of the King's law.
"One night several years after Captain Bush had laid out his cemetery and two of his children had been interred there, he saw a light moving in a mysterious way through the grounds.
"The next night he looked for it again but saw nothing, and as the graves were undisturbed, the fact soon escaped from his mind. A month or two after that he saw the light again. It came and went like the flickering of a great candle.
"He called his dogs, and with his flink-lock over his shoulder he strode across the fields, to find nothing but a quiet burial place, with the mute, white headstones of his two little children reflecting in the starlight. It troubled Captain Bush, for he feared that his nerves were breaking down and that the strange lights were but the fancies of a weakened mind. So he said nothing but watched from his window and noted every two or three weeks the peculiar coming and going of the light.
"He observed also that on the nights when he saw the light a strange black schooner, long, and rakish, lay at anchor just outside Field Point. Sometimes he saw her come to anchor before the sun went down, but oftener she crawled in at the edge of the evenings as the shades of night were settling across the water.
"That the presence of this black schooner was accountable for the lights in the cemetery he felt certain, and he may have suspected their meaning, for on one occasion, in the broad daylight, he made his negro servant dig beneath the loosely lying sod in the cemetery yard. And the digging revealed the great wonder of those colonial days.
"Beneath the sod was a vault, unknown to the Captain, and supported, strange to say, by an arch of seashells, many of them great tropical conch shells, wedged in one beside the other, and keyed in place by the battered fragments of coral reef. There was a noisome, musty smell in the place that suggested between decks of a slaver, and the slimy ooze upon the floor smacked of rum and molasses.
"I never heard the value of the smugglers treasure, the Captain Bush had all the barrels rolled into his cellar, and many a glass of that Santa Cruz rum was drank by the great open fireplace in Captain Bush's hospitable home.
"No one ever knew when or by whom that vault was built but that it was built, and of sea shells, too, is very certain. And Captain Bush, to keep the smugglers out, he said, used it for a vault for the dead, and scores of bodies, including the old captain's, were placed there in the years that followed.
"When the vault is torn to pieces this summer, and for this first time in one hundred and twenty-five years the sunlight reaches all its odd nooks and corners, and touches the glittering bits of ancient seas you will realize that I have told you the truth.
Source: The Greenwich Graphic, Greenwich, Connecticut. Saturday, March 17, 1894. Page 1.
Transcribed and Audio by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
OPENING THE MYSTERIOUS VAULT
IT DISCLOSES A SIGHT THAT MAKES EVEN THE UNDERTAKER PALL - IT IS ESTIMATED THAT FIFTY BODIES WERE ENTOMBED HERE - NO CLUE AS TO THE IDENTITY OF ANY ONE OF THEM - THE INSIDE OF THE VAULT PRESENTED A SCENE THAT MIGHT BE LIKENED TO A NIGHTMARE.
"We have opened that mysterious vault that the GRAPHIC had a description of a few weeks ago," said Undertaker Mead to a representative of this paper on Friday evening of last week.
"Mr. W.S. Waterbury and myself are going down there tomorrow morning, and don't you want to come along with us and see what the mysterious vault has disclosed?"
Bright and early Saturday morning Undertaker Mead and Mr. Waterbury with their cameras, and the writer, were at the door of this vault.
Mr. Mead had given instructions to his men to disturb nothing whatsoever inside of the vault until he had taken a picture of it.
What a sight it presented, this dark recess– the abode of the dead – as we gazed inside standing in the doorway! It was like a horrible nightmare after eating a hearty Thanksgiving dinner.
The floor of the vault is covered with a mass of debris that once were human bones. There were skulls and all the bones that make up the body lying promiscuously around. There did not seem to be any coffin or anything that looked like such a receptacle. But these had all probably rotted away and left nothing but was white and hard.
Mr. Mead thought that there must be about fifty bodies represented by these remains.
It seemed to him the coffins been piled up one on top of another, and that the lower ones had rotted away, being the oldest, and the top ones had gradually fallen down until finally they had become mixed in one pile of bones.
Isaac Lewis Mead Building.
Mr. Mead and Mr. Waterbury succeeded in taking a very excellent photograph of the inside of the vault, a copy of which lies on our table as we write, and it is a picture suggestive, realistic, and a shudder comes over one to look at it.
One day last week, three carriages drove into the ground of the Putnam Cemetery. They contained H. Lynde Harrison, Undertaker I. L. Mead, George G. McNall, James R. Mead, Henry Mead, Thomas Ritch and John Dayton. After some little consultation Mr. Harrison agreed to purchase for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad a plot of land twenty feet square, situated on the west side of Putnam Cemetery.
This plot was obtained for the purpose of a burial place for the bodies to be removed from the vault and the cemetery back of the Mansion House, over which land the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company to construct their additional tracks.
The contract for removing these bodies was given to Undertaker I. L. Mead to, with instructions to enclose all the remains found in the old vault in one grave in the center of a lot in Putnam Cemetery, and to remove all the other bodies to separate graves in this plot and put the stones at the head or foot of them, as they were found in the old place.
The mound in the center for those who were entombed in the vault to have a slab over it with a proper inscription to indicate where the remains came from.
On Thursday of last week, Mr. Mead, with a corps of workmen, begin the work of removing these bodies. They knew where the vaults were situated, and so dug down at the end of it to a distance of about three feet, and there they found the doorway of the tomb. At one time there has been a door hung on hinges, but this had been taken away, evidently, and the aperture have been stoned up.
It did not take long to force an entrance here, and by Friday the vault was opened for Mr. Mead's investigation. It seemed it to the workmen as though the vault was full of bodies and those last there had determined to put in one more, and the last coffin have been placed in such a way as to give the impression that the opening was stoned up to keep it in place– in other words the vault was as full as it could hold when the last body was put into it, which was about thirty years ago.
We said that there was nothing to show the identity of the bodies in the vault, but they did find one plate on which was the name of Brown, and this was all. So far as they could judge from what little woodwork could be seen, the coffins were not enclosed in the second box. Mr. Mead very carefully and thoroughly gathered up the remains in this vault and enclosed them in a very large box, and this was interred in the mound at Putnam Cemetery. There were about twenty-five single graves in this old cemetery; and they have all been opened and the contents carefully removed to their new resting place in Putnam Cemetery.
Mr. Mead thinks that the cemetery was a very old one, for he says he could not turn up the soil in any portion of it to any depth without coming across some bones. It is more than probable that this graveyard was used before the Revolutionary war, and up to within about thirty years ago, and was the cemetery for Horseback.
These are all the names that could be deciphered on the head-stones, Sarah, wife of Bush Mead; Bush Mead; Nancy, wife of Matthew Mead; Matthew Mead; My Mother, Pamelia, wife of Steven Marshall; In Memory of Rebecca, wife of William Gilmore; In Memory of Justin B. Mead; In Memory of Polly Mead; To The Memory of David Bush; (David and Sarah are deposited in the vault); In memory of Samuel Bush; In memory of Ann Bush; Mary Aphelia, daughter of William and Mary Sherwood; Susan Denton; John Anderson and wife.
The last body placed in the cemetery was H. Jane Davis, wife of William Davis, June 17, 1867, aged 36 years.
Mr. Mead expects to have all the bodies removed this week. He has superintended the work himself, and no one could have exercised more care or done the work more conscientiously and thoroughly than he has. Thus doth the hand of time and the march of progress compel the old to give way to the new.
Source: The Greenwich Graphic, Greenwich, Connecticut. Saturday, May 19, 1894. Page 1.
Transcribed and Audio by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
