On February 27, 1842, Jerusha Howe died from tuberculosis. It was a disease she had lived with for years, with bouts of remission. Tuberculosis, also known as consumption, phthisis, the “White Plague,” and the “wasting disease,” is a chronic, infectious disease. Symptoms include fever, chills, cough, fatigue, loss of appetite, and weight loss. It was notorious, not only for the number of lives it took, but for who it affected. In 19th-century New England, it was known that tuberculosis was prevalent in young people.

To learn more about tuberculosis, please click HERE. To read about mourning in the 19th-century, please click HERE.

Jerusha Howe’s final resting place is Mount Wadsworth Cemetery in South Sudbury. Part of the land on which the cemetery was built was the site of the 1676 battle of Green Hill during the war known as King Philip’s War. Buried there are Captain Samuel Wadsworth and the men who fell under his command.

According to Sudbury’s Town Historian, Alfred Sereno Hudson, the cemetery had some additional burials during the 1830s but underwent enlargement in 1842 with Jerusha’s burial serving as the catalyst for expansion. Upon her death Jerusha had left a sum of money in her will for a Howe family monument and her brother Lyman was charged with finding a location suitable for the elaborate memorial. Adam was authorized to oversee building the monument. The Old Burial Ground, known as the Revolutionary War Cemetery in Sudbury’s Town Center, was deemed inadequate to house the ornate obelisk. Lyman worked with A.J. Goodenough and Israel Howe Brown, cemetery property abutters, to secure space for the family plot on a slight rise in the northern section of the cemetery. Once Jerusha’s monument was installed, many Sudbury families followed suit, purchasing plots and erecting memorial stones. “Miss Jerusha’s monument attracting so much attention, and being probably the principle cause of many selecting their lots here” (Hudson, 576).

In the earlier part of the 19^th century the garden cemetery movement had increased in popularity. Around the 1830s families shifted from having burials in utilitarian graveyards to planned burial spaces that were landscaped and beautifully maintained, “not just theaters for increasingly private funerals but for new rituals of memorial visiting that went along with increasingly elaborate mourning” (Larkin, 104).

In 1842 Jerusha’s monument and the fencing surrounding it, cost $850, including labor, the equivalent of $29,143 today. The obelisk and decorative base appear to be made of marble. A decorative, carved urn atop the obelisk symbolizes containment of the soul and an image of a weeping rose with the head snipped off of its bent stem appears in relief on the base signifying sadness over a young life cut short. The inscription says, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the Spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Today the fencing around the Howe plot is gone and the inscription is weathered by acid rain and the elements. Still legible are the words stating that beneath the monument, “repose her earthly remains” along with her father, Adam Howe, Sr. (77 years), and Jerusha, her mother (74 years). Brothers Lyman and Adam Jr., and Adam’s wife, Olivia, are buried in graves to the left of the monument marked with small headstones engraved with their initials.

Above: Photocopy of Jerusha's will (two pages).