By Peter F. Stevens

Beneath the old stones and markers literally reposes much of the old town's history. Dorchester's early movers and shakers share the same site as lesser-knownmen, women, and, sadly, so many children who once walked alongside the Atlantic and the Neponset, up the town's hills, and through its once-sprawling orchards.

Today, to wander through the old cemetery and to ponder the lives thatthe old stones measure comprise a way to connect with Dorchester's past.

The burial ground was first delineated in 1634, its boundaries "five rods square." As historian William Dana Orcutt surmises, "this was not the first burying-ground, the supposition being that an earlier one existed around the first meeting-house, near the corner of the present Pleasant and Cottage Streets."

However, the second cemetery, laid out at the corner of Boston and Stoughton Streets, would receive the remains of many of the Mary and John settlers and their descendants, as well as other Dorchester residents of great or modest reputation alike of the town's first three centuries.

So proud would locals of the 19th century be of the old cemetery that they anointed it "one of the oldest and most interesting inthe United States, yielding only to Jamestown, Va., in antiquity of inscriptions."

While many of the stones are weathered beyond legibility and others are fragmented, some of the inscriptions survive.The importance of those chiseled old lines testify to people who both embraced and understood the often

fleeting and fickle nature of life.Dorchester residents of the 19th century understood that the words etched upon marble, granite, or other stone surfaces offered a record of how the earlier generations of Dorchester had lived and had thought.

As one noted, the burial ground's "gravestones have frequently been consulted by antiquarians for historical and biographical notices. Few locals took a greater interest in the stones and their inscriptions and epitaphs than did a bonafide Dorchester character named Daniel Davenport.

"Uncle Daniel," as everyone in town knew him, served as the sexton of the First Parish Church for nearly fifty years, starting his tenure in 1799. He came to know every inch of every plot of the old cemetery, for, during his decades as sexton, Uncle Daniel officiated at 1,593 funerals.

In the 1820s, Davenport studied and compiled the inscriptions of the Old Burying-Ground. He compiled them in the "Sexton's Monitor and Dorchester Cemetery Memorial," published in 1826 and dedicated to his pastor, the Reverend Dr. Harris.

With fondness, "graveyard humor," or perhaps a measure of both, Uncle Daniel penned his wish "that it might be many years before you [Rev. Harris] or your family need my services in this solemn vocation."

The First Parish sexton's volume proved so popular with locals and with historians that it went through three printings. Davenport not only chronicled the town's venerable past by recording the stones' epitaphs and other information, but also added his own often colorful notes about the deceased to whom those inscriptions applied. Of Deacon James Blake, one of Dorchester's early luminaries, Davenport writes, "He languished about seven years with an ulcerous leg, very painful, but at last he died with an epidemic cold, which carried off many aged people."

Beneath those lines, Davenport offered the lines from Blake's gravestone:

Seven years strong pain do end at last,

His weary days and nights are past,

The way was rough, the end is peace,

Short pain gives way to endless ease.

Davenport wrote that "a stone which had been broken into forty-five pieces" contained lines that were "a very ingenious reference to Mercantile affairs" in Dorchester:

Here lies three clerks, their accounts are even,

Entered on earth, carried up to heaven.

In his notes, Davenport surmises that the inscription was both apt and subtle, as it was "the business of a clerk to enter accounts in the daybook, and carry them up to the Ledger; it is casting up the reckoning for Time, and striking the balance for Eternity."

As one that particularly caught Davenport's attention was that of William Pole,"an ancient School Master in Dorchester, who died Feb. 24, 1674, aged 81 [an incredibly long life for the 17th Century]."Pole, as Davenport cites, wrote his own epitaph, which serves as a fascinating "window" into the religious mindset of the Dorchester of the 1670s:

Ho Passenger! it's worth thy pains to stay,

And take a dead man's lesson by the way.

I was what now thou art, and thou shalt be

What I am now, what odds 'twixt me and thee…

Death is the door, the door of heaven or hell:-

Be warned, be arm'd, believe, repent, Farewell!

Davenport seemed moved by a terse but poignant epitaph "taken from the gravestone of a child of Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Rachel Hall, aged 10 months, died 1803:

Parents of children take a last adieu,

And so must children of their parents too.

In an intriguing mix of religion and "demon rum," the epitaph of another genuine Dorchester character, tavern-keeper William Wilcox, who died in 1820 at the age of 39, was written by his pastor, the Reverend John Codman.

Wilcox's watering hole stood directly across the road from the Second Church.The barman sold rum and other spirits to locals before and after Sunday services, but during services, Wilcox was always perched in one of the Second Church's pews.

Orcutt writes,"In spite of his [Wilcox's] calling, however, he was a devout worshiper and believed that he was fully justified in combining his business with his religion."

The Reverend Codman's wry words on Wilcox's stone relate:

In business diligence and care he join'd,

In spirit fervor with his hope combin'd,

With sacred truth his life did well accord,

He serv'd the public while he serv'd the Lord.

Davenport appears to have been preoccupied not only with the epitaphs of others, but also with his own. In 1827, the sexton asked the Reverend Harris to write a gravestone inscription for him.

Then, Uncle Daniel went to the Old Burying-Ground and dug himself a grave and placed his stone over it. His actions proved premature -Davenport lived for 33 more years and passed away on December 24, 1860, at the age of 88.

Despite the ministrations of Uncle Daniel in the cemetery, the burial ground had fallen into a state of general disrepair and overgrowth by 1835. A local man who had the proverbial green thumb stepped in to restore the old plots and stones and to add an inimitable bit of landscaping.

Samuel Downer, who cultivated the Downer Cherry, rejuvenated the Burying-Ground. According to Orcutt, the civic-minded horticulturalist "devoted much time and taste to improving the dilapidated condition of the monuments, and to cultivating ornamental shrubs and trees."

The importance of the cemetery to the descendants of those who "sleep beneath the stones" pealed in the words of Edward Everett's oration commemorating Dorchester's 250th anniversary: "The ancient burial-ground hard by…upon whose early graves may yet be seen the mossy unknown stones placed there by the first settlers for protection against the wolves…preserves the memory not merely of 'the rude forefathers of the hamlet,' but of some of the most honored names in the history of Massachusetts."

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of Notorious and Notable New Englanders ( Down East Books) and The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48 (Brassey's.)