FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, LANCASTER, MA
BACK TO RESULTS
During the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 as many as eight Redcoats were killed near the Hartwell Tavern as the British Regulars retreated through the town of Lincoln back to Boston. It was reported that three of the dead soldiers were buried where they fell “along the road” while five more were loaded into an oxcart and interred a few miles away in the Lincoln town Cemetery.
Mary Hartwell, a woman who lived along that stretch of road, would later remember the burial of the Redcoats:
“…on the following morning…we gave attention to the burial of those whom their comrades had failed to take away. The men hitched the oxen to the cart and went down below the house, and gathered up the dead. As they returned with the team and the dead soldiers my thoughts went out for the wives, parents, and children away across the Atlantic, who would never again see their loved ones…I followed the rude hearse to the grave hastily made in the burial ground. I remember how cruel it seemed to put them into one large trench without any coffins.”
In 1850 Henry Thoreau visited the Lincoln Cemetery on one of his walks, and noted the grave of the British soldiers. He talked with William Wheeler, saying that it was Wheeler’s grandfather who carted the soldiers to the Lincoln burying ground the day after the fighting concluded. Thoreau even mentioned that Wheeler recalled hearing, “Old Mr. Child…say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of ranks and fell dead…”
Thoreau would also report on a bizarre postscript to the burials: “A few years ago one Felch, a phrenologist, by leave of the selectmen dug up and took away two skulls [from this cemetery]. The skeletons were very large, probably those of grenadiers. William Wheeler, who was present, told me this… William Wheeler, saw a bullet hole through and through one of the skulls.”
It seems that a phrenologist named Walton Felch took the skulls on the road and used them as props during his lectures on phrenology, the pseudoscience that studied the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of a person’s character and mental abilities. Upon Felch’s death in 1892 one of the skulls was returned and reburied – in Concord at the North Bridge! The other skull has been lost to history.
The Lexington Road Cemetery is currently the only active cemetery in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with lots available for purchase by Lincoln residents only.
