The month of November, opening with the great Solemnity of All Saints, carries on the theme of earth and heaven, of death and eternal life, reflected in the days of commemoration for the dead that punctuate these weeks. For our archives this year, we have been looking back into earlier editions of the monastery’s “Newsletter.” For our November selection, we have uncovered an issue that included a reflection from Fr. Philip Wilson, O.S.B., (1925-2017). Fr. Philip was professed as a monk of Portsmouth in 1948, 75 years ago, passing from this world just over 5 years ago. Fr. Philip’s haunting rumination here on those who passed their lives on this property before us remains timely. The more recent creation of the golf course has made more visible some of the history and provides reminders of our predecessors whose traces had been less accessible when he wrote his piece. The course has added signposts for Hessians’ Hole and Bloody Run, and also has added markers identifying several of the family cemeteries scattered over these grounds. For our November archives, we reprint Dom Philip’s reflection on “Those Who Have Gone Before Us.”

1983 Yearbook Dedication to Dom Damian Kearney

The issue of the Newsletter from which the piece is taken was put together by Dom Damian Kearney, in 1989. Prompted by the arrival of the November commemorations, Dom Damian offered nearly thirty-five years ago a theological reflection in that issue as preface to the somber and moving piece Dom Philip had composed for All Souls Day. Fr. Damian writes: “As we approach November, which marks the end of the liturgical year and prepares us for the end of the seasonal year, the church offers us a timely reminder of our own physical end. And this she does in the twin feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Life after death has a perennial fascination for us; it has been the subject of literature from the very start of civilization, and it holds a prominent part in Scripture, especially in the Book of the Apocalypse. All Saints deals with the life of glory, the final and everlasting state of the just as they share in the beatific vision. Such a state is hard, indeed impossible, to describe save through analogy, … although it has inspired some of the greatest art...”

Red (’63) and Paula Cummings greet Dom Philip at the 60th jubilee celebration of his ordination (2013).
Vincent “Vinny” Martin (d. 2014), school courier, in the background.

As we rediscover Fr. Philip’s thoughts on “those who have gone before us” here at Portsmouth, we cannot help but recognize, and remember in prayer, that both he and Fr. Damian have since been added to that number.
 

“Those Who Have Gone Before Us”
Dom Philip Wilson, O.S.B.

All Souls Day is a time for us in the community to remember that not all of Portsmouth’s dead lie with the monks and members of the familia buried in the Abbey cemetery near the old front gate. Just as there were many who lived on what is now Abbey land before the coming of the monks, so also many were laid to rest in it.

First in time are the unmarked graves of the Indians which early explorers, like Verrazano in 1524, found flourishing on Aquidneck island, as, to judge from the numerous artifacts they left behind, their ancestors had for untold centuries before them. I myself have a pipe and a quantity of wampum from an Indian grave which my great-great uncle, walking from Newport to Bristol Ferry along the roadbed of the railroad as it was being laid during the Civil War, found had been uncovered by the excavations. The sight of that grave, of which no record survives, could conceivably have been the cutting through which the railroad runs, between our boat house and the mouth of the creek.

Dom Philip at work on the grounds

Secondly, there are the graves of those who fell during the Revolution in the Battle of Rhode Island of 1778. Some of the most furious fighting of that battle took place on Abbey grounds when the British infantry, made up in part of Hessian mercenaries, charged down the slope of Anthony’s hill (known by Abbey students today as “Cross Hill“) upon the Continental forces. The slaughter was great. According to one eyewitness, “sixty were found dead in one spot; at another thirty Hessians were buried in one grave.” No wonder that the nearby stream, reddened by their blood, has ever since been called Bloody Run and the spot where they were laid, Hessian’s Hole.

Gravestone of Mary Chase,
on the Abbey grounds (golf course)

We may feel more sympathy for those Hessians than did the Americans who had to fight them. The typical Hessian was a German peasant unlucky enough to be conscripted by his prince expressly so that he might be hired out to England and, as an English historian of the Revolution says, “shipped off to fight, at a distance of a thousand leagues from his home, in a quarrel about which he knew very little and cared even less.”

Finally there are as well, scattered over the property, at least three burial grounds used by the Freeborn, Chase, Anthony, and other families who for generations farmed the Abbey’s stony acres. Today most of those buried in these family cemeteries are as nameless as the Indian and Hessian dead. Nature has had its way with their resting places, and if one makes the effort to break through the brambles that fill the plots, it is only to find that the gravestones are mere stumps or toppled fragments. Even where they still stand, weather has all but effaced their inscriptions.

One of the few still intact and legible is that of Mary Chase, who died in 1805. A fine example of the stonecarver’s art, it bears the name of its maker, “E. Smith junr. Newport.“ The inscription is surmounted by a funerary urn and weeping willows, while the verses below, mournful and seemingly bereft of Christian hope as they are, yet voice a feeling that many must have known: