Item from the Past: Hopestill Barns

Some notes I took after my first visit to Boston on May 10, 1982. Later, I spent a lot more time there, but I still remember this first walkabout pretty well, and especially making the acquaintance of Hopestill Barns, who is a permanent resident of the city. Purcell’s, as far as I could tell later, vanished sometime after my first visit.

Spent most of the day in downtown Boston, a place where pedestrians cross whenever and wherever they want. Today was moderately cool and slightly rainy, a persistent drizzle, but it didn’t interrupt my walking.

Downtown: little shops, old graveyards, big shops, cast iron, brick streets—delightful for walking. I found a place to have lunch, a thoroughly good meal, Purcell’s, a cafeteria in an alley next to the courthouse. Remarkable meatloaf & potatoes & veggies & milk, for $3.50

I hung around King’s Chapel graveyard a time, reading the names on the old and weatherbeaten tombstones. Meanwhile, the good people of Boston wandered by. They’re used to the stones. For quite a while, I was the only living soul in the whole cemetery. On a stone the size of a spiral notebook, I found this [all caps, bullet points between all the words, including the inconsistent 17th-century spelling, or maybe I wrote it down wrong]:

HOPESTILL • BARNS •
THE • WIFE • OF • IAMES
BARNES • AGED • 24 YEARS
DECEASED • THE • 19 • OF
AVGVST 1676

There are more famous people buried there, such as John Winthrop, but I was struck by Hopestill for some reason. Death at 24 impresses me even more now than it did when I was younger than that. Taken away by a disease no one in Boston dies from any more? Died in childbirth, a common fate almost too horrible to think about? The tombstone makes no comment. If I ever return to downtown Boston, I’ll try to drop by again.