After digging up a gravestone for a woman who was born in the late 1800s, local experts are trying to figure out who it belongs to and how it ended up at a popular clamming spot in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
"Right now, it's really just a mystery," Joshua Gerloff told NBC10 Boston Wednesday.
Gerloff, president of Epoch Preservation, and conservator Rachel Meyer, a member of the Ipswich Historical Commission, have been researching how the headstone ended up at Eagles Hill Landing and who it belongs to. They believe the headstone was used as a mooring for some time and may have once belonged to a Martha D. White, now buried in Wayland with her husband, who is listed on the 1940 census as mapmaker for veterans' graves with the Works Project Administration.
"Everybody has a theory, which is like, the best part," Meyers said. "You know, it just kind of gets your your mind going. Is there a connection there between her husband's work and the fact that her grave has sort of ended up in a random place? Is gives you more questions than it does answers, doesn't it?"
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"He worked on this kind of thing and here's his wife's stone out in the sand," Gerloff said.
The headstone now sits by a rosebush in front of Ken Warner’s house after Gerloff unearthed it from the mud during low tide at Eagle Hill Landing Tuesday. Warner lent Gerloff an old tooth brush, and with a bit of light cleaning, they read the inscription "Martha D. White 1879 to 1950," and noticed there was a hole in the middle of it.
"I was talking to some clammers, and they would use any heavy object to moor," Gerloff said. "They would throw down an engine block, you know, or in this case, a gravestone."
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"I've seen moorings, you know, people use different things for moorings – never a headstone," Warner added. "It was quite a day."
Meanwhile, Meyer started researching ancestry and burial records online and found just two people named Martha D. White with matching birth and death dates across the United States. One of them is listed on a gravestone with her husband in Wayland, according to Meyer, which led her to believe the stone was replaced and discarded after her husband died.
"I don't want to go into too much detail about her, because a lot of it is like — you can't 100% know it's her," Meyer said. "I think if it is her, we're going to have to decide with the city of Wayland what we're going to do with the stone, ultimately. If it stays in Ipswich, I actually think that we would happily adopt Martha here in Ipswich as part of our story."
Meyer is working with officials in Ipswich and Wayland to find out where Martha belongs, but for now, her stone will remain in front of Warner's house at Eagle Hill Landing.
