Smallpox victims, originally uploaded by Ali Crehan.

Look again at yesterday’s photo of the James-Clapp burial ground. Notice anything? Like those three headstones outside the cemetery walls?

Here lies Thomas Holmes, who died of the smallpox in 1792. The other graves are harder to read, but a little digging through Samuel Deane’s book History of Scituate finds mention of them:

“There died of the small pox in Scituite, in 1792 and 3 — David Nash, Charles Clap, Paul Otis’ child, widow Daman, Thomas Holmes, Mary Nash, widow Chittenden, Thomas Webb, Stephen Wade, John Daman, John Stetson, and Reuben, a man of colour.”

Not far from this site is the Maritime and Irish Mossing Museum, which once served as a smallpox hospital. Thomas Holmes was from Marshfield, but was buried outside the walls of this burying ground after he died; the fear of that disease was so strong that even in death the bodies were feared and were often buried far from home.

UPDATE, 4/12/11 – Today I spoke with John Galluzzo, a local historian, author and naturalist who previously served as the director if the Scituate Historical Society and thus knows the town fairly well. John tells me that the gravestones were moved from across the street, and that the bodies were actually buried at what is now the town’s landfill. It is unclear what happened to those poor souls’ remains, as the state took possession of them.